ralphsaunders

http://www.incredibox.com/?music=4F9B48F2E5B02

"Please only download 4 files at a time or you may be disconnected from the file servers."

I distinctly remember following a basic HTML & CSS tutorial and not being able to work out how to get the CSS to style the HTML. The example code worked fine, but the relationship between the two wasn't explained so when I wrote my own it didn't work.

I only learned of semantics 12 months after starting with HTML + CSS. It would have made a massive difference if someone had pointed me to a beginners guide (online & free, of course) that explained the way the web was born and how HTML is a way of assigning meaning to a document.

I think a lot of the problem is the people writing the tutorials and resources for this kind of stuff want to teach people something, while the people looking for this stuff want to learn it. Perhaps this is why a lot of Google's results for these kind of things are forum threads and other discussions (usually filled with outdated or plain wrong information, I might add).

Another is that encouraging people to work for free is rather questionable. Arguably it's preying on people who might be rather desperate for money when their time would be better invested in other things.

But most of all, is that the term 'designer' now includes people who produce that poor standard of work as well as, for example, the very talented people who work at Apple. It cheapens the term, and I think that's a lot of the reason you see new job titles appearing regularly from within the industry - a "user experience" designer didn't really exist 2 years ago and it basically means "generalist" or "designer".

A lot of clients evaluate design based on aesthetics, which is obviously only half of the solution. It can be very difficult to differentiate yourself from the 'designers' who churn out lots of ill thought through work, especially if you're new in the industry and you don't have lots of client experience to write about.

99 designs and similar are at the very low end of the market and the argument is that it becomes harder for skilled designers/artists to find high-paying work as more companies opt for the cheap route. There are more reasons to hate it from a designer's/artist's point of view, but that's the core of it.

That said, kickstarter certainly doesn't fit in that category, if anything it brings more paying work to designers/artists.

The fact that the designers were asked their prices on the criteria that "All prices are for design only, i.e. they don’t include any sort of coding (no HTML, no CSS, no Javascript, no PHP, etc.)." is rather telling with regards to experience.

Design doesn't stop at the mockup stage — anyone who has designed & built the front-end of a website knows that the design continues to evolve outside of Photoshop. The nature of the web dictates a website must be flexible so it can accommodate different browsers and resolutions. It's very difficult (read: expensive) to design for a dynamic medium in a static work space, and it's disingenuous to call a static, non-interactive image a website.

This post would be better titled "How much can one charge for a website mockup?"

FTFY

> Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages. Story pages could still have one or two tastefully-presented ads, but preservation of the content is what will keep readers happy, engaged, and willing to continue paying their subscriptions…just like in olden times.

http://andyrutledge.com/images09/newsSite/nyt-redux-article....