I'm very close to being completely awesome. Seriously.

So I've just hit a little bit of a landmark in my web design journey. I've added commenting features and an RSS feed! It all makes me pretty excited about my web skills. At the beginning of the year I made two resolutions: 1) Learn the benefits of restraint and 2) Update my web skills to make a me a more complete designer.

When I graduated from college Plymouth State University, I decided to work on my print skill, because it was an area that I really quite weak. So for the next 5 years or so I worked in pre-press (at Upper Valley Press) and in newspapers (Backstage Pass Magazine and Watermark). During those five years after graduation, web design almost completely changed. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) became the law of the land and I was completely oblivious to it. I became aware of my oblivion sometime last year while trying get Watermark's website redesigned. I felt completely lost during most "shop-talk" with web designers when just a few years ago, I was completely comfortable.

My limitations really hindered sense of self as a designer. I felt incomplete. So, being the person that I am, I set a goal to pick up where I left off and find my sense of wholeness. My first step was to subscribe to the software education site Lynda.com. I first became aware fo this site when my lovely and talented assistant Heather reccomended it to me. She had used it to learn more about design programs that schooling didn't touch on. I signed up for a free week and I was completely hooked. I decided that the $25 a month for Lynda.com's services was a well worth it investment and I highly reccomend it everyone.

So in January I started my quest to become a web designer and it's a been a bit of a process. There are so many major differences between the way that print and web design works. To be a print designer, you really don't have to know a lot of coding languages and structures. You just make something look good. There are definitely some skills in print that take a while to get a handle on (proper type setting, color space correction, etc) but they are all fairly intuitive and as long as the final product looks great, it doesn't always matter that things like the type setting was done in a proper fashion. Web design totally does not work like at all. You have to do things in a very specific way or else it doesn't work right. Often times you have to read through lines of code to find problems and work in ways that are very, very much not the ways that creative minds work. A lot of left-brain junk.

I became frustrated many times and confused more than once, but it's all starting to pay off and I'm really excited about that. Having RSS feeds commenting were things that seemed completely beyond my reach a year ago, but here I am! Comments and RSS feeds all up in my websites business.

Now I just need to start thinking about what my web design resolution will be for next year. :-)

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