BELLAMYBUDIMAN

I’m going to try to keep this explanation as easy as possible. I run a design company which is technically a service provider. By running a company like this, I value my clients highly and we try at the very best to respond to their needs as soon as possible, as good as possible, as reliable as possible, and the list goes on. All of this to keep the integrity of their trust to our company. Why? Because trust is hard to gain, and they paid for something that they expect to be so fucking damn good. We make that our priority.

The case of most Indonesian service providers is that they sell crappy services with a hefty price tag and somewhat idiotic knowledge of their own product or how it functions. The ISP we’re subscribed to often lied just to cover up their connection problems (the problem seems to always be on our side, not theirs), the telco I subscribed to is a pain in the ass who can’t even sell smartphones and usage plans the way they should, one of the banks I use proclaimed themselves stupid enough that they can’t count how many characters are there in a single email address, one of the insurance companies we subscribed to is constantly trying to find a way to not pay for our iMac’s service fee, thus negating the function of the insurance plan we bought from them. Ironically (except for the bank and the insurance), these dumbass providers are still one of the best in town.

Here’s one example. We paid almost 600k a month for our 1.5Mbps internet connection. Compared to broadband plans in the US which cost roughly $30 a month for a 10Mbps speed, yes, our connection is a fraction of the speed with twice the price tag. Therefore, since we paid for an expensive connection, I expect them to give us a fucking good service. Now when they miraculously provided me with an unexpected downtime, I expect them to give me one good reason why there was a downtime, why it’s down, why the hell it wasn’t scheduled, and if it were in maintenance, why the hell it wasn’t done at dawn when people was sleeping.

Here’s a tip for you dumbass providers, if you want me to treat you as goddamned idiots, by all means I would. And second, you never mess around or lie to someone who has more technical knowledge than you do, and if you ever do, I will bring the storms of hell upon you. I called to ask you what the problem is and not for you to fucking lie to me with a bogus and stupid reason.

Hoaxes have been around for probably centuries in scale of internet time. We’ve seen the never-ending Send-This-to-XX-People chain mail, the infamous Nigerian scam letter, and the recent “Uskup Agung” letter, although I’ve never seen it myself. But recently, Facebook users have been forwarding this:

PERHATIAN!! FACEBOOK BARU -BARU INI TELAH MENJADI SANGAT OVERPOPULATED. TIDAK SEDIKIT ANGGOTA YANG MENGELUH BAHWA FACEBOOK MENJADI SANGAT LAMBAT. CATATAN MENUNJUKAN BAHWA ALASAN YANG ADA DIKARENAKAN BANYAK NON-AKTIF ANGGOTA FACEBOOK. KAMI AKAN MENGIRIMKAN PESAN KESEKITAR UNTUK MELIHAT APAKAH ANGGOTA AKTIF ATAU TIDAK. JIKA ANDA PENGGUNA FACEBOOK YANG AKTIF, SILAKAN MENGIRIMKAN PESAN INI KE 15 PENGGUNA FACEBOOK LAIN

Well, if you’re one of those people who actually believed in this shit, I’m just going to say DON’T YOU KNOW THAT IT IS A FUCKING HOAX? Seriously, since the dawn of the internet I’ve seen this in Friendster, I’ve seen this in Yahoo! Messenger, and hell, I’ve seen this on MSN, which is probably three of the most famous social networks or messengers joined by internet newbies. Don’t you even realize the pattern by now that NONE OF THOSE NETWORKS ACTUALLY CLOSED or THAT YOUR ACCOUNT (AND IN FACT EVERYONE’S ACCOUNT) IS NOT EVEN CLOSED OR SHUT DOWN AS WELL?!?! The reason why hoaxes like this are so popular is because people doesn’t even want to spend a tiny bit of their brain power to analyze that this is entirely a hoax.

Seriously, people, you should stop forwarding scam letters, chain mails, or whatever the fuck it is. It’s STUPID. SERIOUSLY STUPID.

And I’m gonna do you a favor in case you’re just lazy enough to use a search engine and find out if hoaxes are ACTUALLY hoaxes. Knock yourselves out!

Over the years, I’ve had my share on teaching and experiencing (as a student) what our curriculum on web design is like. And in this post, I am going to show you why I am deeply concerned on how the web industry is going in our country.

So first things first, I have been participating in the internet since 1995, that was when connection was scarce in the country, we had to rely on unreliable dial-up modems and ISPs at that time. Long story short, I’ve learned how to hand-code HTMLs by 1998, turned into an amateur web designer in 1999, started Neuro-Designs, and worked my way up as a professional web designer until now, in the world of web standards and Web 2.0. So, if you have doubts on what I have to say here, I have a hefty good reference of fellow web designers and developers to back me up, and frankly, perhaps you weren’t meant for the industry.

I believe it was back in 2005 that I had no other choice but to take the Web Design class in the campus, of course, to pass with my Visual Communication Design major. And seeing what I had to learn there, frankly, I was not impressed. Not to brag, but what’s covered in the curriculum, that’s exactly what I learned back in 1998, and in that class I was already practicing my CSS and table-less layout skills. Maybe because of this disappointment, I received a C for the subject. Yes, believe it or not, Bellamy, a web designer, received a C on the Web Design class. Believe it or not, that’s the grade I got. A few years afterwards, I got the chance to serve as a student’s assistant in the very same class. Years have passed, but the curriculum has not. I feel like I was teaching what I learned 10 years before. I was frustrated, and this is definitely not what web design is supposed to be. And if this continues on, then it is no surprise that Indonesian colleges can’t produce competent web designers, and this is exactly why major IT companies and design agencies in Indonesia doesn’t even have a clue what web design is now like, they’re just too stubborn and too ignorant to even evolve their own knowledge. They’re still stuck to what’s probably pre Web 1.0, while now is the era of Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 is just probably around the corner waiting to be unleashed.

Here’s what we were taught using the very same curriculum year after year: Build a website out of PhotoShop and Dreamweaver’s WYSIWG editor. Yes, no fundamental basics on interface designs, no rules explained on why websites have a set of its own typography treatment, why websites are not to be treated like brochures, and why good websites should be built on hand-coded HTMLs. None. No matter if it has a good structure or not, just make a working website, as simple as that. At this point, I can assure you that having someone build a website from scratch in iWeb could result in a better web-standards compliant website.

As a professional web designer, I’ve learned the hard way on what it takes to create a real deal web design from scratch. And professionals throughout the world agree that creating a fully-functioning website from a WYSIWG editor is probably just the same as catering a dog poop. Web designing is no easy task, it requires design knowledge (yes, we need to have a good sense on design rules, grids, typography, and every basic graphic design fundamentals), interface design knowledge, web typography, website structure design, and to top it all, although optional, we need to know how to hand code these websites using XHTML, CSS, and every other technological tidbits that keep evolving over the years. That’s why not everybody could be a web designer or developer, and that’s exactly why if you want to be a web designer, you need to start off on the right track and no excuses, you have to be computer-literate. And if all of these seemed overwhelming, then you’d probably better finding some other interest.

In my opinion, if we’re going to make the curriculum any better, you can’t fit everything in a single semester, and in a single subject. This is just physically and mentally impossible. In order to produce good web designers, you will need to do the subject in stages. Here’s what I have in mind:

Web Design 1: Introduction to web design, fundamentals of interface design, and website structures
I see no point of having people to create a fully functional website here. They must understand the basics, know what the essence of interface design, and learn how to cope with the limitations in designing for the web. Furthermore, students must also be taught on how to plan their websites, build a good structure while maintaining the fundamentals. The goal at the end of the subject is for the students to be able to produce good website design mockups, and that’s it.

Web Design 2: Template conversion, HTML, CSS, and table-less layout
This stage covers a more advanced degree to those who are interested in becoming a real deal web designer. And with the things taught in Web Design 1, hopefully they will understand why web design has its own limitations to serve the next step: Template conversion. Students must be able to grasp the essence on how HTML and CSS code works, and when they do, rest assured that this will aid them to be a faster and more competent web designer in the future with minimal hiccups in the design to prototype process. This stage also covers the importance of losing tables as a part of your layout. Just face it, everybody uses CSS for layouts now, table-based layouts are ancient.

Web Design 3: Website building
This stage is the highest degree on becoming a competent web designer. While in the end we would probably still need web developers to aid our work, being a web designer who could produce a working website prototype can surely help in what you do for a living. In this stage, students are expected to learn the basic fundamentals of how to put your website into a working prototype, whether online or offline. This also involves knowledge on how to set up your domain name, hosting space, and every other requirements to make sure that your website will definitely WORK, including how to port your website into a simple CMS such as WordPress.

On the internet, many professional designers have probably written an article on why being a web designer is not as easy as it looks. One of the good articles that I’ve found is this. And as you can see, as long as we’re still using the same curriculum over and over, sorry, it just won’t work. Web technology is evolving every single day, and what we’ve been using now is the same thing I used 10 years behind. And this is the reason why I never wanted to teach another web design class anymore. It’s frustrating to shell out students with a decade old set of knowledge. Can anyone confirm if this is also the case on other educational institutions as well?

Some good reads for inspiration:
A List Apart
CSSREMIX
For Web Designers
Jeffrey Zeldman
NETTUTS
PSDTUTS
Shaun Inman
Smashing Magazine
Web Designer Depot
Web Designer Wall