153 - The Complicated Future of The Web Designer

The web is getting more and more complicated, but where does that leave people trying to learn the trade? Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED Music and links from this episode A Walk by Mystery Mammal Lonely Satellite by Mystery Mammal Conviction by Little Glass Men Line-by-line notes I don't like making this podcast a look back on the golden days But today warrants a revisit When I first started making websites An embarrassingly long time ago now Some 16 years ago There were really only 2 things you needed to make one HTML And CSS Some people were still using tables for layout, but that's a different story for a different day And now, in 2017, you need way more than that Git, terminal, grunt, gulp, npm, package managers, jquery, JavaScript, Vue.js, deployment commands It isn't simple to make a website anymore This episode is all about my belief that the web is getting too complicated This is AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess MUSIC Yes, before you say it, you COULD still make a website out of just HTML and CSS these days When I make a website for myself, I usually like sticking to just these two simple things But if you rocked up to a web agency up and down the land tomorrow looking for a job And they asked you what you knew And you replied with HTML, CSS, and I know FTP to upload it They wouldn't be very impressed, and you'd be unlikely to get a job Let's get this straight,  for most agencies, they now expect more From graduates, they expect a lot of complicated technical knowledge Things like Git, task runners, setting up Terminal and using the Terminal are just the tip of the iceberg And I'd argue that this knowledge is expected And honestly, we've done this to ourselves The web industries desire to continue to push the boundaries, and to continue to get better To use faster and more efficient technologies To use better methodologies Has brought about a massive technological barrier to the web design game The rise of the role of a "front end developer" has lead to the development of lots of obscure and difficult to learn technologies I know all this, because I've tried to teach this stuff I've kept it simple too Things like basic Git commands, basic Grunt stuff, basic terminal commands And all of this goes of the head of nearly everybody I've tried teaching this to We're in this industry every day, and I don't think we've realised how complicated we've made things I genuinely don't think we've realised it Even responsive web design is difficult to teach people, and a difficult concept for a young designer and a young web developer to understand Over the past