I'll be running a brand new course this semester at the School of Visual Arts in New York City called Web Design for Art Directors.

The Background

I thought up the course after having a conversation with an old friend that was trying to make the transition from being a traditional art director in an advertising agency to also handling the interactive side of his agency. During the conversation he voiced some of his concerns which took me quite by surprise. Specifically, he was having great difficulty understanding exactly how the internet works, what the technology is capable of, which programming languages should be used and in what circumstances, and how do you know if a freelancer is pulling your leg. I gave it some thought, and quickly realized that I already had much of that information in my head from the years of producing and generally being in the trenches as a web designer myself. So I decided to offer it as a course and see if the computer art department would be interested in running it as a continuing education class - they loved it! So this summer it will be running for the first time.

Class Info

The class will be meeting on Saturdays from 10am - 2pm from June 14th to August XX. I know what you're saying, "waste my saturdays for the summer on a class? no way!" Well I promise I will make it worthwhile. If you've ever talked to someone whose taken one of my courses before, then you'll likely have heard that I run my classes more like a Vegas comedy act than a technical class. The main reason is because I learned early on in teaching that students in continuing education are usually afraid of the technology. So I've found that humor puts everyone at ease and really gets everyone in the mood to have a good time and look forward to class each week.

Non-technical

Even though we will be discussing much of the technology behind web design, we won't be forcing ourselves to become experts in it. Its much more about being able to identify things than create them. For instance, we'll be learning how to tell if a website validates, but we won't be going into the actual code to make it do so. Although, if the students all feel they would be very interested in getting a bit more technical, then I would be happy to adapt the rest of the semester accordingly.

The Curriculum

The course runs for a total of 8 weeks, with a different focus each week. Some of the key things we will be learning are:

• Defining the roles in a web studio (project manager, web designer, web developer, production artist, etc..)


• The tools used (Textmate, Dreamweaver, BB Edit, CSS Edit, XRay, etc...)


• Grid design (Blueprint and 960)


• Web Standards, Accessibility and why they're important (Valid Markup).


• Separating content from the design (XHTML and CSS)


• Understanding scripting languages and when to use them (Javascript, Actionscript)


• Understanding interactive and when to use it (Flash, AJAX Effects)


• Understanding programming languages and when to use them (PHP, ASP, Coldfusion)

Sign Up

So if you're in the New York City area this summer and want to take the class, you can sign up over at the SVA website. You should also checkout some of the other classes I'll be teaching this summer, 5 in all (yeah, I'm nuts).

Sign Up for the Course