incessant ramblings

The Web Design Survey 2007 brought many surprises indeed. It's very interesting to see the field in numbers. While it obviously doesn't show the whole world of web design, it at least gives a general idea. It's likely a pretty accurate representation, at least if the survey was random.

I was quite surprised at the amount of people who were white. Perhaps it's because we're from a Pacific Northwest background where a lot of Asian people reside. I would have thought there would be more Asian background web designers.

While it was interesting to see the large differences in job titles, I am more interested to know how many people strictly do coding OR designing, and how many actually do both. This interests me because I enjoy doing both in my free time (though admittedly I am very lazy when it comes to code so often times my designs just sit in the form of PSDs and never get to live their lives out on the web. I think it's time I get a slave sidekick coder...).

Speaking of titles. There were sooo many listed! When the whole survey is for web design, what becomes the difference in a "web designer" and just a "designer"?

The ages of those who were surveyed also stuck out at me. Ignoring the fact that the bar graph looks like a hand with a highly disproportionate "favorite finger", I was quite surprised at how large that middle group was. While I would expect to see more young people, seeing as the web is a fairly "new" thing when it comes to the design aspect, it just seems like there would be a bit less of a drop in numbers.

The gender thing? Actually doesn't surprise me. While yes there are more females in our senior class than males, I don't actually meet many females who are so gung-ho on web design. Not to mention it's apparently still taboo for women to be on the internet. According to everyone you meet on IRC: 'men are men, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents'. Go play an online game. Good luck trying to convince someone you're a girl, unless they also happen to be female. This is why the gender split does not surprise me one bit.

And because I don['t want this to get too long, the last observation I would like to make is the amount of people who have been at their current job less than one year, compared to how long they've been working in the field. Apparently web designers hop around jobs quite a bit!


This survey is quite interesting. It's pretty long though, and somewhat difficult to look at on a PC. I am definitely going to have to print this out and check it out more!