Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:28:05 +0100

Confessions of a Web Designer

Generally, when people approach me to work with them, they come bearing a certain number of assumptions about web designers. While it’s nice that someone somewhere who has clearly never met me thinks I’m a latte-drinking, WACOM-owning, Mac-plugged hipster, the reality is that I sit here most days in my pyjamas, working away on an ageing Dell desktop and trying to figure out how to open those new-fangled .docx document types.

And while I do take my coffee very seriously, my credibility in this arena is greatly diminished by the fact that I do not know how to roast my own coffee beans. It’s very hard to hold my head up at conventions for swanky web designers, which explains why I don’t go to those. (That plus I don’t get invited.)

So here, for your Monday morning amusement, are the Top Ten Things You Never Want to Hear About Your Web Designer:

• I am completely self-taught. I have never taken a web design, coding or marketing class, and am thus entirely unqualified for pretty much any job you might want to hire me for. I’m pretty OK with that.
• I learned to code HTML creating free pages on GeoCities, because I wanted to edit the colours on the provided templates.
• I learned to build an SQL query in FrontPage. At the time, it was the only visual builder around and it opened up the world of databases to me. I will be forever grateful.
• On the very rare occasions when I actually need to create a table for, you know, tabular data, I still use FrontPage, mostly because it’s so rare I can’t really remember how to code tables any more.
• I learned basic CSS from a woman named Vee McLaughlin over many hours in an ICQ chat window. She was incredibly patient and to a huge extent, I owe her my entire career.
• I live in the Motherfucking Bank Guilt Spiral. It is impossible for me to blog if I owe any client work. I always owe at least one client work; therefore I almost never blog. Or do laundry. Or buy groceries. Or go to the bank.
• I do not use PhotoShop. I mean, I can, but 98% of the non-vector graphics I create are done in PaintShop Pro. The version I use was released in March of 2000. I will never upgrade it.
• I overwrote a client’s live site by accident in 2001. There was no backup. I still have nightmares about it and have never made that mistake again.
• I stuck the color #92BD5D in my palette back in the day when we used only web-safe colours, and waited more than 10 years for it to become trendy so I could use it pretty much constantly. When it becomes passée, I may never work again.
• I am overwhelmed by data and have not opened my RSS reader in a year. 99% of my reading list comes from Twitter. I do not subscribe to Smashing Magazine, Mashable or anything else I’m supposed to be reading, including your blog.

The final blow to my credibility:

I own no Apple products and there is no part of me that wants an iPhone.

It is that time of the year again when Camara volunteers from Ireland get to visit Africa. We are very delighted to be with a team of 8 volunteers, who have been in the country for the last 3 weeks and doing their final week now. During this time, they have had memorable moments meeting local volunteers at Camara hub, visiting schools within Kigali and outside of Kigali in the North and the South and joining in the social life with everyday citizens.

It is during these wonderful moments that they have delivered cutting edge short courses and hands-on training to selected schools as well as to volunteers at the Camara hub in Kigali.

Some of the schools they have interacted with include:

1. ES Doctrina Vitae
2. Nyamata High School
3. Sumba Secondary School
4. St. Rita Nyarunyinya
5. ES Ngara
6. ES Maheresho
7. ES Mbazi
8. GS Rwamiko
9. GS Ruramba

Some of the short courses they have administered include:

• Basic Networking
• ICT in Education (for school teachers and trainers of trainers)
• Basic ICT (for newbies)
• Basic Web Design (HTML and CSS)
• School Administration (ICT approach for school administrators)

Upon the completion of the short courses, certificates of merit were awarded to the participants.  It has been a pleasant and joyous experience having trained with these volunteers and the pictures below say what words may not.

We look forward to more of this kinds of exchange in fostering Camara’s motto of “Empowering Education through Technology”