A few months ago when my daughter was four years old, she stood beside my desk chair and asked, "Mommy, where's your wipes it?"
I looked up from the computer screen. "My what, sweetheart?"
"Your wipes it."
It's been almost exactly four months since I decided to "go professional" as a web designer, and I'm suddenly seized with the desire to pause a moment and take stock. In four months I've come a long way. For one thing, I no longer feel like I'm drowning. That's good. I still might only be treading water, but at least I'm not lying at the bottom of the pond.
In the first article for their new Digital Web Magazine column, "Web 2.0 Design: Bootstrapping the Social Web," Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter discuss the future of the web and its impact on design.
[The] Web 2.0 world...is not defined as much by place and is less about visual style. XML is the currency of choice in Web 2.0, so words and semantics are more important than presentation and layout. Content moves around and is accessible by programmatic means. In a very real sense, we’re now designing more for machines than for people.
If the tools we use are indicative of our personalities, then call me Eve, 'cause I've got multiples. When I work on a design, my screen bristles with open tabs, and I jump around from one HTML editor to another so much I sometimes forget which one I'm in.
