The very talented Rob Goodlatte has recently started a series of short interviews of other designers on his blog, and was kind enough to have me participate. Click through to read my thoughts on programming vs. design, web standards education, and justifying design decisions.
http://robgoodlatte.com/2007/04/24/three-questions-for-jeff-croft/
001 // Dan Boland // 04.24.2007 // 12:45 PM
You’re dead on about the state of teaching web design. My wife is getting her Master’s degree in Library Science the weekend after next, and this semester, she’s been taking a basic web design class. They’re still teaching people to use <center> and <font> tags. It’s nuts. Nearly every assignment, I find myself saying, “Next time you go to class, tell your teacher that this is a really stupid way of teaching people how to do this.” I understand that web design isn’t something you can really teach in one course, but there’s the easy way and the right way.
002 // Jeff Croft // 04.24.2007 // 1:06 PM
Andy Clarke has a great story about how his son got detention for telling the teacher she was wrong when she said that the way you started making a webpage was by intersting a table. Funny stuff. But sad, too.
003 // Oliver // 04.24.2007 // 4:51 PM
That stuff Andy Clarke talked about in the panel at FOWD was absolutely right — I’ve been taught exactly the same thing in our oh-so-basic (though I can hardly blame them) IT lesson — and that was about 2 months ago (I didn’t actually say anything, though!)
004 // Kirk // 04.25.2007 // 3:38 AM
Andy’s story was very funny yet tragic and unfortunately pretty much the standard in schools (at least here in the UK). Both of my children have stories of their class going through an average of 12 IT teachers in a year. Most have no IT training, and the few that do often don’t stay long enough to actually teach the children anything. My son attends a tech high school and even they can’t get IT teachers.