I come from a graphic design background and am trying to pickup more and more programming bits of knowledge. I don't yet hold any title with "Interaction" in it. I'm still a very broadly titled "Web Designer" at my work, but I love it. By process of elimination (being the sole web designer) and great interest, I play the role of Interaction Designer. I definitely have an interest in the field. Baby steps, though.
I was lucky enough to have an uncle who owned his own company. I worked for him during the summer of 2000 before my freshmen year at college. At one point that summer, my uncle asked me to create a photo album for the website. I got into HTML a bit using the CoffeeCup editor and was fascinated. That gallery lead to creating a new website for the company (2001) for them and eventually reworking the website for an updated version in Flash (2004). Looking back, I disagree with the Flash site idea, but that's not the point of this thread :-) In 2000 - first year at college - I took over the role of webmaster of my a cappella group which gave me a great canvas to work/test on. Sophomore year I picked up a second major of Graphic Design. My work tended to be fairly simple and minimalistic which is a style I wish I could stray away from every now and then but I digress. I did an internship with a multimedia design company as the web intern. It was around this time that I started to realize that confusing websites were annoying and difficult to use. I began to try to use common sense more in my designs and following basic ideas like the fact that the main navigation shouldn't outweigh the sub-nav, content should be legible, and elements should be able to breathe and easy to find/use. As I transitioned into the real world from college and was working in SEO, I always wanted to redesign client sites to make them more usable (why work so hard to send traffic to a site that people can't easily use?). While looking for jobs in web design, wanting to leave SEO, I started to focus a lot more in CSS and usability and fell in love with both. I love that these realms are changing so frequently, but at the same time there's so much information out there that I find it hard to wrap my head around it all in order to determine what path I want to follow or methodology I want to adopt. Someday I will be an interaction designer! I'd get paid for doing something I try to do automatically anyway! - Scott ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
