file under “design autobiography” > My first real experience with print design came during my junior or senior year of high school, when I took Ms. Bennett’s yearbook class. I didn’t take yearbook because I had any profound interest in print design. I took it because it was reputed to be an easy class. Most days, we did very little or we checked out from school (it was a closed campus) and went out to sell ad space, which generally ment we’d try to sell ads for a few minutes and then go to a local burger joint for an order of fries and Dr. Pepper. If that ruse wasn’t availible, we’d grab a camera and go take pictures of local landmarks and such, or anything that was on the shot schedule.
But I did lay out some pages for the yearbook. And we layed them out old-school: on some large graph-paper style forms. You’d mark out your design in pencil, number your photos on their backs, and figure out (with the crop tool) how much each needed to be enjarged or reduced to suit your design. Then everything for that spread went in a large envelope and got checked and then sent to the publisher. Desktop publishing may have been alive and well in 1988, but it hadn’t made it’s way to Hunsville, Arkansas (population 1,394) just yet.
Ms. Bennet had one (and, as far as I know) only one design principle. And, to her, it wasn’t a theory, it was a fact: keep all interior space equal. It wasn’t a bad principle, in fact. If you lined your pictures up along the gutter, and went for a fairly circular design, keeping the space between the images equal would give you a fairly tidy design with a minimum of work.
Sometime a few years later, I got a copy of Aldus Pagemaker (yes, Aldus–Adobe hadn’t bought it yet). I think it was version 4.0. I used it to make press kits for local bands I knew and to lay out J-Cards for cassette tape compilations. But this was all for fun. I thought I might get good enough at it to get a job laying out ads somewhere, but I was in college working toward being an English professor, so design was interesting and useful to me, but not a career goal.
Then the web happened. I was still an undergrad English major (soon to be an English grad student). And I thought the web was the coolest thing that had ever happened. I downloaded a copy of NCSA’s A Beginner’s Guide to HTML and started coding up my first homepage. I coded it entirely with Pico via a telnet connection to my account on the university server. It was the typical web page of that time: blinking “under construction” text, gray background, no images at all, random list of links that you might (but probably won’t) find interesting–just a shout out to the world.
I was awarded a teaching assistantship by my graduate program. And I understood from the beginning how useful a web page could be for teaching, even if you only used it as an archive for handouts and other things handed out in class. So I coded up a homepage for my English classes. And that marks the beginning of my entry into the field variously known as “educational technology” or “educational technologies” or (more recently) “education technology”, though I didn’t know it at the time. In fact, I didn’t know it until much later when I’d all but finished my M.A. in English and found myself living in Philadelphia and interviewing for a job as a technology coordinator for the public school system. It was then that I found what I thought would be the perfect job for me–one that combined equal parts computing, education, and media. So I went back to school and earned an M.Ed. in the field that still can’t decide what to call itself. And I, before I was quite finished with it, found myself working in the field.
But people in my field come in several different flavors. Some–in my program, quite a large percentage–seem quite afraid of the ins and outs of technology itself. They prefer either to theorize about it or groom themselves for administrative positions where they can oversee the implimentation of technologies they don’t fully understand. Then there are those of us (myself included) who enjoy the ins and outs of technology and try to keep our skills comparable to those in other branches of IT. This is something of a conundrum from me, because I think a lot of good could happen in education if technology coordinators had a stronger, more computer science oriented skillset as well as a broader knowledge of what’s going on in IT outside of initiatives that only concern educational technologists.
But I’m getting off topic. I meant this to focus on design. And, in recent years, that term keeps getting broader for me: encompasing ‘look and feel’, usability, and functionality at all levels. It started for me, like it must have started for many designers, with print. Then came static web pages followed by several schemes to eek more dynamic functionality out of them (call it the server-side scripting phase). Now it’s moving on to learning how to roll client/server apps that use interfaces other than web browsers (even though web-based interfaces are still the bulk of my work and, I think, often the best solution to a wide range of problems).
In design, you start with a problem you want to solve. Then you apply the tools at your disposal (and “at your disposal” usually means “those that you know how to use reasonably well or that you can learn reasonably fast”). So, I suppose, the goal for any designer is to gain new tools and new proficiency with the tools you already possess. That’s my goal anyway. It started with graph paper, then desktop publishing software, then HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. Now, finally, it’s meant moving into object oriented programming with Java. Who knows what’s next.