Safetygoat

How many things should you learn?

The obvious answer to this is, “as many as you can.”  And with the web, you really can keep on going and going and there’s so much more to learn.  You start learning photoshop and illustrator, and do your best to learn the tools, learn the rules of design.  And then you decide you want to build a site, and start using dreamweaver, but things don’t turn out, so you learn to hand code your html and css.  This opens up a whole new can, and now that you’re designing cool stuff, you want to learn how to make it “cool” for people to interact.  So you put some javascript in using jquery, but things don’t work as you want them to, so you start rooting around to find out how to fix it.  Suddenly you’re spending all your time coding and you’re not designing any more at all.

This is a problem.  While I agree with (some of) the experts that all web designers should be able to do decent css and html, it becomes a problem when a designer has to spend all of his or her time coding. (The debate on learning both is still raging on this actually– some experts say designers should only do photoshop, others say they should have an understanding of the coding, but that’s beyond my expertise.)  When there’s no one else to do it, how do you refuse to do it?

I have always been one of those people that likes to do and learn lots of new things.  Hell, I’m learning how to spraypaint, how to sew clothes, how to use blender (a 3-D program), how to make silicon moulds, besides the fact that I play piano, would like to do gardening, and like to read a bit of philosophy.  A person that stretches herself or himself too far– is he/she destined to never be an expert at anything?  Have I stabbed myself in the foot by trying to do too much?

art css