Sharing your journey is the heart of mastery
This post was originally published on StayDiligent.com.
When I was ten, pondering a future where I was a comic book artist or computer programmer or maybe an anthropologist, my mother gave me eerily prescient advice. She put a reassuring hand on my knee and said, "I bet you'll do a job that hasn't even been invented yet."
This was the late '80s—five years before the first web browser and a good ten before the concept of a "web designer" began to emerge. Even once it had been invented, it was still evolving—everything from the tools to the rules to the goals are constantly changing.
A shared education
By the time I got to college there still wasn't a Web Design major at Carnegie Mellon, so I doubled in Fine Art and Philosophy while taking as many Computer Science classes I could. I had great teachers, but none of them taught me web design. For that, I'd stay late in the computer lab and peel back the skin of Zeldman.com (and Jason Kottke's 0sil8.com) to scrutinize the underlying HTML.Like my entire generation, I learned web design from the web itself.
Imagine you work at Ford Motor Company, tasked with capturing energy from the brakes to charge the battery. It sounds silly to call up Toyota and ask them how they do it. That's what web folk do, every day. We have a problem, we find a solution, we blog about it, other people learn from our mistakes. Some days, I literally paste the error code into search and find a solution.
The path to mastery
Jeffrey Zeldman confesses in his interview for The Great Discontent:I made a million mistakes and didn’t always know what I was doing, but I was in a transitional period of my life and had a lot of time to devote to learning. … The other part of my path is that I started teaching and writing right away. I loved writing and I was good at it. Plus, I thought that HTML was so easy that everyone in the world could learn it.Mike Monteiro, explaining why he'll be answering design student's questions on Mule's Off the Hoof blog, admits:
So my own design education is spotty. I know precious little about theory, and I still have to look up the names of different letterforms and such. … When I started my career as a designer I was terrified that people would find out how much I didn’t know. Then I realized everyone else was terrified of the same thing. So I muddled and plowed my way through years and years of mistakes, all the while tucking the lessons away for later so I wouldn’t forget.If you asked me who I'd consider masters of web design, I'd quickly name these two men.
When I stop to consider why, it's not because they're the "best" at web design. It's because they've taught me the most about how to be a web designer. Their mastery is a direct result of their learning and sharing. Deeper than that, they recognize the responsibility that we shoulder as the first generation of creators working in a new medium and their potential impact on future generations.
Looking forward, looking back
Some part of me will always think, "but I still have so much to learn!" Despite over fifteen years designing websites and entering my fifth year running a (profitable!) web design business, the voice in the back of my head is whining that I have to learn this or that new technology before anyone would consider me an expert.As Jeffrey Way writes in Don't Worry, We All Feel Overwhelmed, his advice to new web developers:
You don’t master HTML, and then master CSS, and so on. If only it was that easy! The reality is that our web development training is similar to an RPG; you slowly level up in each category, as you gain more experience. … Your peers, your teachers, your developer heroes—they’re all still learning new things every day. That’s what makes this industry so exciting.At some point in your journey for knowledge, you realize that you've been concentrating on reaching the ever-advancing finish line and ignoring the distance you've already traveled. I've come a long way since those late nights in the college computer lab and it's time to share some of what I've learned.
I think I'll start a blog.