Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson are web designers and digital artists who also teach design at the University of Ulster. Recently, they co-wrote a book, HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas' Approach. They actively promote Web standards in universities and are known as Web standards people. The famous Web development and design website Six Revisions has done this for them. Interviewed.
[Chris Wallace]: Nowadays, Web designers are embracing Web standards. However, courses in this area seem to be lagging behind in universities. Where do you think the biggest progress in Web standards education in universities is?
[Christopher Murphy/Nicklas Persson]: Although the Web standards movement has been around for 10 years, it has been disappointing in universities. They have not incorporated industry best practices into the curriculum. Universities are supposed to be standards or innovations. Frontier, although there are some schools making progress in this area, not many. We are in an era of rapid industry development, and the only way for universities to not fall behind is to keep their courses in line with industry developments.
This often means that we need to update our teaching materials every year to ensure that what we teach is relevant to the industry today or tomorrow. We have made great progress in integrating with the same industry. Last year, we worked with many industry partners at home and abroad to ensure that what we teach is innovative and inspiring. We have also established a good relationship with the alumni association, allowing those students who have graduated to come back and teach us their experiences.
In terms of integrating education with industry, WaSP's open Web standards course InterAct Curriculum seems promising.
[Chris Wallace]: In what areas are we lacking?
[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: If universities want to make a difference in Web standards courses, they should closely integrate academic and industry. It is true that combining the two requires a lot of work, and it is easy for people in the industry to criticize the shortcomings of university education. However, a more effective way is to combine industry and academia to jointly develop dynamic courses.
Our biggest success in this regard has been establishing partnerships with industry, allowing students to engage with live projects and provide feedback, most recently using Campfire to gather feedback online and allowing national and international designers to showcase their work.
We have also launched an international guest lecture program, inviting famous designers to speak at our university. We have received support from many famous designers. Recently, we invited Nicholas Felton to the school to display his inspiring works. Also invited are Nicholas Roope of Poke and Hulger, Andy Stevens of Graphic Thought Facility, and design critic Adrian Shaughnessy. Also to be invited are Elliot Jay Stocks and Paul Farrington of Studio Tonne.
[Chris Wallace]: You have taught several very talented young web designers. How do you teach young designers who are not contaminated by table layout and have never written CSS Hack for old browsers?
[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: We start from the basics. Before we come into contact with (X) HTML and CSS, we talk about the basic principles of design and introduce the basics of design, including typesetting, information structure, presentation, editing, and grid systems. etc. We encourage content first and emphasize the importance of semantic tags.
In our second-year design courses, we emphasize this and encourage students to freely choose tags to organize content. We spend a lot of time making students understand that a well-structured document is part of the design, and that semantic tags are as important as CSS. .
Only when we have fully mastered the correct tag technology will we enter CSS. Here, we once again emphasize the concept of a system. Throughout the process, we encourage students to understand the importance of accessibility, make students aware of current accessibility guidelines, and the importance of clear document structure.
As important as the foundation, we encourage students' spirit of exploration. We graduated from an era when Web design did not exist. We are all self-study. Therefore, we hope to unlock students' creativity.
[Chris Wallace]: There are several talented young designers among your students, such as Lee Munroe and Chris Colhoun. Which of them are worthy of attention?
[Christopher Murphy / Nicklas Persson]: We are fortunate to have taught many outstanding designers. Among them, the following are worth mentioning:
Lee Munroe, a graduate of our MA Multidisciplinary Design course, quickly gained respect in the international web design industry, and as well as working on The Big Word Project with Paddy Donnelly, he started Lookaly, a brilliantly designed business directory site.
Paddy Donnelly, who also graduated from the MA Multidisciplinary Design course and is now a creative designer at Nascom in Brussels, has proven through Twitter interviews with Tim O'Reilly, Guy Kawasaki and Paul Boag that he is very forward-looking in using social networks as a marketing tool. sex.
David Henderson, winner of our 2008 Design Award, has successfully become a freelance designer, and his project The Best of Belfast is outstanding.
Chris Colhoun is about to finish his studies. He went to interview with many famous web design companies. Below is his website. ..
International source for this article: http://sixrevisions.com/interviews/web-standardistas-on-web-standards-in-education/
Chinese translation source: COMSHARP CMS official website