The Blog

As we approach the end of another year, I suddenly feel compelled to reflect upon these past 12 months.

While I don’t normally write these sort of retrospectives, with this particular year I feel there are real reasons to catalog the events of the year. 2011 was perhaps the most significant year of my career since 2005 when I started working at New West. This was the year I decided to step back from my print background and fully commit to interactive design and development as a future career path. Fortunately I wasn’t completely blind — I started learning HTML and CSS ten years ago in college, back in the dark days when CSS-based layout was in its infancy and tables were still in vogue. As recently as 2008 I was still building sites that way. In ’09 and ’10 I transitioned to modern page layout techniques and started experimenting with HTML5 and CSS3. I also started learning the WordPress theming engine and eventually launched a few small sites on my own. I was making progress but at the end of the day though I was still a print designer crafting for a medium whose limits and capabilities I didn’t fully understand.

In 2011 I knew things had to change. Having recently lost the account manager in charge of interactive projects, I decided to take more of a leadership role at New West. I’d always been a bit dissatisfied with the way some of our previous web projects had turned out — while the initial designs were fine, they always seemed to lose some essential quality in translation to live code. With the advent of new CSS3 specifications and advances in JavaScript, maintaining the fidelity of the original design is far more possible than before. With this in mind, I announced that whenever possible I would be writing site markup for all future web projects to maintain quality control over final appearance. I began learning jQuery and vanilla JavaScript and started integrating it into my design work. Finally, emboldened by progress I’d made in learning WordPress, I chose to develop entirely in-house when possible.

While I worked on a larger variety of web projects this year than in previous years, three site launches were particularly significant in that I learned something different from each. Trilogy Health Services was the biggest by far, and taught me how to manage a large-scale web project in collaboration with an external development team; it was also troubled from the beginning and as a result I learned how to roll with crises. Louisville International Airport essentially wrapped the existing site in a new design and added a new homepage and taught me how to work within an existing framework. Finally, MedVenture Technology was developed completely in-house and served as an opportunity to experiment with JavaScript — I built the site around a single page design and wrote a fully-functional AJAX page loader (unfortunately, just prior to site launch I had to remove it due to client request).

I suppose what really motivated me more than anything was pure necessity — feeling the winds of change made me realize I needed to refocus. Print will never die, but its role will continue to diminish, and with it opportunities will fade. The web is new. The web is now. Everyone wants to be a part. It’s one of the few markets currently growing — not just growing but exploding, particularly in the mobile space (to whit, Google says 700,000 new Android phones are activated per day, and of course Apple has sold tens of millions of iPhones).

That leads into the second major reason I recommitted to expanding my skills in 2011. Print is static, old, limited and predictable. The web changes almost daily; major services come and go faster than any brick-and-mortar business; information exchanges instantly and sequenced events which might have stretched over days or weeks sometimes happen in hours. Just to cite a couple of recent examples, observe GoDaddy’s rapid backpedal on SOPA in the face of a wave of bad PR, Disney’s decision to pull a TV episode with an anorexia joke just hours after a former Disney actress with a real eating disorder tweeted her disgust, or the Ocean Marketing debacle.

2012 is shaping up to be an exciting year. I feel I’m right on the cusp of something big. I just hope I’m ready for it when it happens.