Good Day. This is the year I started taking the web seriously, not as a lesser cousin of print, but as a craft with its own demands. I was coding in Dreamweaver, getting deep into HTML, watching CSS evolve into something you could actually build with, and realising the web deserved my full attention.
Along the way I noticed something that has shaped my whole approach since. Not many developers love design, and not many designers love to build. I had taken courses in development, intermediate programming, object oriented thinking, C and the rest, under an instructor named Mr. Koreshi at Centre High, and that grounding put me in a rare middle. I cared how a thing looked and I cared how it worked, and I refused to choose.
The first website I was genuinely proud of was for Mountain Industrial Safety, for a gentleman named Robin Posnikoff. In its day that was an enormous project, and finishing it well told me I belonged in this medium. Not long after came TNT Motorcycling, a riding school, and that one had a real back end, a booking and management system that held all their students. A site that did something, not just a site that sat there. That is when the web stopped being decoration to me and became architecture.
Print taught me a discipline I carry straight into the web. A friend of mine, Frank, used to remind me that some things are simply too small to read, and on the web you are fighting pixel densities and screen displays at every turn. In print we always tried to stretch the envelope of how small detail could go. On the web the lesson inverts. Never go too small, and find clever, quiet ways to fit the text without letting it overpower the page.
What resisted me most was the mastery of tables and CSS. It was a confusing realm of column spans and row spans, of structures that fell apart the moment a browser changed size, of writing exceptions for Internet Explorer and then exceptions to the exceptions. That fought me hard, and learning to win those fights is part of how I crossed over.
I did set the web down for stretches after this, drawn into branding and larger design work with developers at my side. But because I could speak their language, the design to development handoff became something I could shape rather than suffer. And I never truly left print behind. I simply kept it beside me, where it belongs.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · April 2006