Get the Designer in your life something they will LOVE.

Uppercase Scarf

Wallets made of Artsy Photographs by DB clay

Univers & Helvetica Ts

Beautiful Typography Calender (via heartfish)

Pantone Bags, Mugs & Wallets

Freitag Bags (via Doug Avery)

Pillows with Typography

Frank Chimero Inspirational Design Posters
The Store has been down for a few days, but prints hopefully will be available again soon.
& I hope this, mostly because… this is at the top of my list this year.

Ampersand Book End/ Sculpture

Anatomy of an A T-shirt

Alphabet Bags

And to prevent gifting mistakes, fill out the Christmas Cheat Cheat!

Want more? Here is last years list, I apologize if some of the gifts are no longer available.

1. Read these books, keep them on your desk.
   Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
   Don’t skim through this book, read it… cover to cover, and do every tutorial one at a time. The copy is terribly cheesy and the tutorials don’t have you building an entire site, but if you do each one in small steps you will find yourself pretty far very fast.

   Designing for Interaction
   This book is a great introduction to User Experience, Interaction design and Information Architecture. It clearly articulates the concepts in a way that will have you applying.

   Designing with Web Standards
   This book will sum it all up and bring it all together for you. Its “why” all the stuff you are about to do is so important.

2. Read sites and blogs about web design.
   Bookmark stuff that you do not understand but hope to eventually understand. Some that I reference frequently are:
   A List Apart
   Cameron Moll
   Dave Shea
   456 Berea Street
   Veerle Pieters
3. Attend Events to learn & make Friends. Lots.
   There are tons of web related events but the ones I have found most helpful have been Refresh DC ( or Refresh in your area), Barcamp, and SXSW. Make friends and add them on Twitter and Facebook, pay attention to what they are talking about and why. You might even find that your new web friends are actually super cool real-life friends, and have other things in common with you like music, 30 Rock, and typography.
4. Design & build something. Start small.
   Build a one or two page site, for yourself, for your dog, for your dad. Try not to use Dreamweaver’s design view, or code hints. But you will. Everyone does. I did. After I did, I realized why I shouldn’t have, so maybe that is a step in the process. But …don’t. I really mean it. Why? Because if you don’t need to depend on Dreamweaver you will become a better designer faster. BB edit and Textmate (my favorite) are all much better alternatives. I realize lines of code may be very intimidating for some designers, and the last thing I want to do is scare you away from building the site, so… I don’t care what you use, just build something.
5. Ask your new friends to look at what you built, and take notes.
   They might not say nice things. They may actually tell you that they got sick of waiting for your images to load or got frustrated over your navigation (not that that is what anyone told me). Thats fine, thats actually good… because it is better to hear it from your friend who can explain to you how to fix it than never hear it from future users who get frustrated and click away from sites you design.
6. Download the web developers toolbar & Firebug
   When you see a site you like, peep the CSS & HTML. At first you may not understand what you are looking at, but get in the habit of just taking a look. As you continue through learning HTML and CSS you will begin to see good versus bad markup. When your site is doing something funky, use firebug to isolate the problem and work it out. Its just a good habit to get into looking at markup.
7. Google everything.
   Dave Shea said that in a SXSW CSS panel a few years ago and I don’t know why I needed to hear something so obvious from someone on a stage, but its a pretty common sense thing that designers don’t always think to do. If you are having a problem with something, someone else probably already had the same problem, and chances are they blogged about it. Sometimes it is hard to even know what to Google, thats when you hit up one of your web friends on AIM and ask them what you should google, then you google it. Bookmark it, tag it, and refer back to it.
8. Build what you built again, and build it better.
   This step is the key. If you are satisfied with what you built the first time around web design is not for you. The learning process happens when you rinse and repeat, every time you design and build a site you get better. Take what you learned from the books, from sites from google, from your friends, from things you did wrong but fixed in firebug, and build the exact same site again. This may sound like a drag but it is the most necessary piece of the puzzle.
9. Become passionate about the Web.
   It takes a LOT of time to transition from print to web, you can’t just do it because you feel like you begrudgingly HAVE to… If you are a passionate print designer its not hard to focus that same passion to the web. If you can design for print you can design for the web, but like anything, it takes work to get there. There is no button to push that will convert your InDesign document to a website, there is no magic pill you can take to make you wake up and know HTML. Just like it takes a lot of work to build a print design career it takes a lot of work to make the transition to web, you have to be motivated to do it. For me it took a change in lifestyle, that may not be the case for everyone but it was the case for me. Just depends on how good you are at juggling work & life.

This post was written in response to the overwhelming questions from the design community on how to transition from print to web that came up at a recent ADCMW event. I am not claiming to be the mac-daddy badass of making the transition, but this is just my advice coming from someone who went to school for print and made the transition to web without any additional schooling or classes. Any suggestions or additions are welcomed in the comments. I also have a whole host of links in my resources section.

Designers have lots of different kinds of styles. Im not a designer who puts on headphones and is content to zone out over a photoshop doc for hours. I am one of those designers who thrives on constant human interaction and feeds off verbal bursts of passionate brainstorming. I LOVE people. I LOVE people who LOVE design . I especially LOVE people who LOVE to talk about design and typography. Oh goodness, that is the trifecta I get really stoked about.

When CDIA at Boston University asked me about teaching a web design class at their campus in Georgetown, I had no hesitation in replying with an overwhelming “absolutely”. Hanging out with PEOPLE passionately perusing a career in the design field? That is a no brainer for me.

Well, of course my first class was more than hanging out, it was a fantastic experience that has reinvigorated my love of the creative web industry. The students who greeted me were already deeply entrenched in the design program. Before starting web design at CDIA students complete a very extensive graphic design curriculum, making them both knowledgeable and excited about typography, layout, and some design history. The enthusiasm that greeted me was an unexpected but delightful surprise, I found them inquiring about the typefaces and talking about their favorite fonts amongst each other. Hell yeah, the trifecta!

Since completing the class many people have asked me about it, and in short all I can say is that I LOVED it. There is a lot more to that, here are my 3 take-aways from my first teaching experience:

1) Teaching is really inspiring. Even though it makes me a lot more busy going to class and planning class, it is also a huge motivator to get off my ass and design more. I left each class with tons of fresh ideas and perspectives brought up by the students and all I want to do now is design MORE and better. Each class was a invigorating discussion and brainstorm, the kind that you leave and you say to yourself, “damn that is better than (insert your favorite vice here)“. Thats right folks, Web Design school is better than ________. THAT good.

2) Teaching web design is 100% dependent on practicing web design. Towards the end of class students filled out wufoo feedback surveys that I created, and it was interesting to find that there was a lot of value added to the content of the class by explaining concepts in real-life context. The class was predominantly structured around the design process, starting with research and user experience and then going in to visual design and brand, and ending with front-end development and build-out. The entire time we followed that process through an actual Viget project to put all of the steps in context to a real world situation. It proved to be very helpful. In addition to my previous example the web design industry is constantly changing, hell… if I skip my feed reader for a day I fall behind, so its hard to imagine what it would be like without actually being in the field.

3) Education in the web design field is evolving. When making my initial transition from print design to web design, a program like this one did not exist (that I knew of in the DC area) so I learned from my peers, blogs, books, and trial and error ( don’t forget that I am still learning ). Many things I learned the hard /long way, but I can skip a lot of the crap and just teach the most effective stuff to my students. Essentially they had a road map that many practicing web designers did not have in their learning process, so watching how quickly they picked things up that took me a while to learn was really gratifying.

Overall the experience was so positive I had to write a blog post about it. I appreciate the opportunity CDIA gave me, but also the enthusiasm that my students have. Sometimes when you stare at a computer screen day in and day out, and rely on twitter and CSS galleries as your main form of inspiration, you get stuck in a tunnel. You forget that rush of excitement you had as a student learning new skills, striving for those big ideas, and the feeling of loving design so much that you will go to great lengths to be able to actually make a living at it. Its an amazing thing to be a web designer and I open my eyes every morning and think to myself, “Wow, I get to be a designer today, and not just any designer… a WEB designer. That is Bad Ass.”