Ignorance is bliss...

I stumbled upon oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com today,  courtesy of @despens a Tumblr blog showing screen shots from old Geocities homepages. I felt a wave of nostalgia as I remembered the awkward, primitive  sites, the men at work under construction pages, brash web safe colours and framesets with thick borders... oh and of course spinning logo gifs!

I had literally just finished looking at the slick and forward thinking jquery conference site http://events.jquery.org/2013/uk/, making use of bleeding edge technology, the HTML5 History API and some beautiful CSS animation.

It struck me just how far we have moved on over the last 15 years and got me thinking, are the new breed of web designers who have never known this distant past at an advantage over the "oldies" who were creating sites back at the birth of the web?

You weren't there maaaaan!

Generally, those who have built websites for over 10 years will have have battled through the early "browser wars", spent countless hours trying to slice and dice a brochure and make it pixel perfect. There has been so much learning by mistake, splash pages for example and then the sweeping advances of Shockwave and Flash.

We are the new wave, we are the future

Those who are free of these battle scars seem to have an element of freedom to their work, the hard yards have been made and we now have web fonts, decent css and by and large reasonable browser compliance (in recent editions). The tools are there and thought patterns are not restricted by the old rules that used to apply.

It's six of one and half a dozen of the other

As the latest twist in the saga takes shape (Responsive Web Design) designers new or old are coming together, pushing the boundries further and trying to impart the new found methods and knowledge on clients, agencies and anyone else who will listen! And it really seems as though people are starting to listen. Zeldman, Paul Boag and the likes have ben banging the drum for quite a while and it must be satisfying to finally see the new generation of designers who are completely sold on semantic markup, usable and content rich websites

Web Design continues to forge it's own path and move further away from being an extension of print design. It is no longer something any designer can turn their hand to as more and more skills are needed and less print skills are transferrable.

Although this constant evolution means you never feel like you know it all, it is an amazing area of design to work in and we should relish the challenges we face each day...

I won't however miss trying to align a horrible table of images and shims in Netscape Communicator and IE4!!