Fixpert

Hello from Silicon Valley. I’m out here on the other coast for the WOW Web Design and Project Management Conference. Presently, I am lounging in my cheetah print bath robe care of the Cypress Hotel where I’m staying — I highly recommend this place, it’s hard to beat the freakin’ cheetah print bath robe, come on!

Today was the first day. We had excellent presentations from Molly Holzschlag and Aaron Gustafson. They’re spreading their Web Standards joy across the galaxy and I am basking in the glory of CSS. Weird imagery, I know, especially after I already put the bath robe picture in your head — basking in a bath robe seems very personal…I’m feeling a little exposed now.

Moving on, I wanted to touch on something that Molly Holzschlag said that really resonated with me this morning. She talked a bit about how important it is for web designers to maintain passion and optimism and to avoid burnout. Just hearing her say that made me feel so validated! A career in web design is no doubt engaging and rewarding — however, it is a job centered around constraints. Those constraints often inspire creativity, but when you are on the brink of burnout, they can sometimes feel like the last straw.

For me, as long as the challenges that I face every day have something to do with my specialization, I’m happy. If they present me with an opportunity to learn, I am grateful. I do, however, have the danger of losing my optimism during those times when so many of my constraints cannot be solved by good web-smithing. For example, maybe a Marketing decision is driving the desire for an interface that will be a bad user experience. The site metrics show that the bad user experience is producing better sales than the interface that tested well with the customers. I cringe, sad face emoticon.

Despite these challenges, I do feel lucky to be a part of something that offers so many unending opportunities to learn, and to work with creative, intelligent, fun people. And, of course, I’m stoked to be rocking out in California with some of those people this week! Air guitar solo!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.