The Adventures of Cindy Li

SXSW 2006: How to be a web design: Superhero

March 11 , 2006

To survive in a modern world, web designers must be superheroes

Web designers need to put so much effort into our lives.
Budd: learn what it takes to become a web design superhero
Every hero has an origin: motivations/where they came from/why they are superheros
Most of us didn’t start out as web design… it was hinted at our strengths
Douglas Bowman got bit by the CSS bug

How did you get into web design

Web design superheroes have strong morals, strong code and a strong moral code. What we think is right and wrong, good design vs bad design

Why are we doing this?

Superheroes are selfless as they fight crime and keep the world safe from danger
Web design superheroes share their skills and information freely
Take little or no money to make the web a safer place
Putting themselves in danger

Superheroes have special motivations

Many web design superheroes have special motivations sucha s prmoting usability or web standard.

To be a superhero you need to be passionate and you want to spread the word.

Passion is a strong motivation
Superman is Clark Kent, spiderman is Peter Parker, Many web designers too lead a secret, double life
You may have seen a web design superhero’s work, but do you know what they look like?

Are they sitting next to you?

Superheroes often retreat to a secret hideaway
Web design superheroes need a secret hideaway, a source of inspiration, somewhere to store super gadgets. Somewhere you are sitting for your next call.

Superheroes are easily identified by their costumes and logos

Web deisgn also require a great logo to set them apart from the crowd
And a super website we need a home and identifiable.

Superheroes often have a mundane job by day and exercise their super powers by night

Many web design superheroes are the same, exercising their skills by night on personal projects.

What super powers do you need to become a web design superhero?

Andy Clarke:Telepathy and Clairvoyance
an ability to see into a clients mind and understand what he means by ” I want it easy to use” and others such vaguerisms
We need to get into a client’s mind and find out what they want to do

Mind Control

An ability to convince a client that he does not need a flash splash screen or pages of content and will read

Empathy

An ability to understand users, their goals and problems

Danger sense

Ability to sense problems and rectify them before they happen
Learn about project management and do better with to have foresight
Keep happy clients

Precognition

An ability to see into the future and anticipate new trends

X-Ray Vision

The ability to see through visual presentation to the underlying semantics, to avoid making presentational markup and CSS
See through the visual presentation and understand the semantics and markup

Invulnerability

Sometimes bullets do fly in the comments of design galleries or on design forums
We can put in all the hours and still come out wrong. It is as a creative hard to understand and when we are proud.  Then the style police start picking on the website. We do the best we can and stop looking at the negative criticisms.
Santa Maria’s article: how to critique and how to take criticism

Invisibility

Where are the women in web design?
Alongside many superheroes is a sidekick
Batman has Robin, Superman has Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane and Krypto the super dog

• Every superhero needs a pal
• Every superhero needs a villain
• Superman has Lex Luthor
• Who are your heroes?

Which superpowers would you choose and why?

What is your vulnerability?
Andy Clarke:Too trusting…
Andy Budd: Self taught and he doesn’t feel he has the vocabulary/traditional design.
Clarke: any schooling for usability training? They web is such a young medium.

Woman in the audience

Perseverence
Much more of a norm that standards/css…
More people are churning out fantastic work

We have key businesses like Amazon, Yahoo, that promote webstandards.

::cough cough:: AOL.. insert plug for.. Getting Your Company to promote webstandards