No other industry in the world changes nearly as fast as the web does, keeping up is really hard and you gotta stay sharp, this is why I created these meetings.
I am a web/graphic designer, when I hear someone say "I have skills in Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Lightroom, Maya 3D, Photography, HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Mootools, PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Action Script, After Effects etc ".
The first thing that comes to my mind is.... These people are trying to do themselves a favor by seeming like they are jack of all trades master of none.
Judging by my name (Sergey), you can safely assume that I was not born in the US, and you are right. English is not my native language, however since moving in the US, from Ukraine I immersed myself in American culture and recently, I realized that I am having difficulty speaking my native language with my own parents.
Great now we know your story, yawn, what does this have anything to do with web design?
To this date, in all of my years as a professional designer (8 years), I have not seen a decent programmer who was also an aspiring and prestigious designer. These are two opposing worlds, you are either engaging in left or right brain, whichever you give the most time, will be the most established.
So why is it that when you see job postings or get recruiter calls, you hear this long list of "must this or that". Because its your job to prove that specializing is the right thing to do, and that you are worth your salt.
I do think it's important to understand all of these technologies, but I also think that specializing is the only way that you stand a chance at becoming a good web designer. You should know a little bit about everything, however you are not remembered for being able to do things at your job, you are only remembered for doing things over the top or extremely well.
So come one come all, I will do my best in sharing my own nitch skills and hope to learn something from you too.
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