Many over the years have asked me what they need to do to be a designer. Unhappy with an uncreative position– many are quick to look to the designer with a little envy and wanting to have that fun job. To live in Photoshop day and day out and “play” for a living. Although we “play” in Photoshop, converting that design to HTML is another occupation all on it’s own.

The reality is that it’s a hard, bumpy and long journey to get here. Web designers are constantly building their HTML/CSS skills by applying what they’ve learned in school with real projects. Then, a few years later– re-building and improving on learned mistakes or tapping into new strategies for browser compatibility.

The fact is– it takes well over 5 to 6 years before you know what your doing…it’s not something you can just jump into and expect to land a job in.

A look down HTML Memory Lane

Back around 2001, I got into web design and built one of my first “sites” for myself. A portfolio of my creative work. It was a time before WordPress’s popularity hit the community although it had a bloggy look…Eric Myer just wrote a couple of books about separating presentation from content and this whole idea of CSS driving the presentation instead of nested tables was JUST starting to coming around.I jumped on that movement and have not looked back.

Here is what my portfolio looked like back in 2001…I had a separate style sheet for Apple’s Internet Explorer Browser!