incessant ramblings

Ah the joys of ambiguity. When coming to Western as a transfer student, I was quite unsure of what the heck I was going to be doing. I didn't come from a large design-class background. I took a couple classes in high school, and the more basic art classes in community college. But never had I heard the term "new media". I was scared and confused! "What concentration should I take? What would I be studying if I joined New Media?"

I have aspired to be a web designer for a long time, but have also been confused on whether I wanted to be coding websites or designing them. All I could come up with was the answer of "a little of both". Then came the question that seems to be on everyone's mind when it comes to this program..."Am I going to learn to code or not?" Luckily in this program, the answer was actually both. Learning the basics of XHTML is great, even if you don't want to code websites int he future it's a good tool to have on your utility belt. As a DESIGNER you really don't need to know anything advanced, but it helps to have those basics so you can help out if needed.

While some of us want to know the more advanced coding languages, such as PHP, AJAX, etc., it is really not a necessity for our likely future jobs. If you do learn it on your own, hey that's awesome! You have more open doors. The unfortunate part is you may end up not getting to do much of the design part that you love so much. I personally would love to learn this stuff. I am slowly learning it on my own, but really for personal reasons. Even though I enjoy the occasional coding, I think doing it for my own sites is quite enough!



But more to the point..."new media." What a horrible term. Much of what we are doing IS new, because the technology changes so much. But it's basics do not change. It also depends on your views of what "new" is. The first crappy website I made was AT LEAST 8 years ago. Is web design really new anymore? What about video? Sound? None of this is new...it is just evolving. I agree that the term "Interactive" or "Communication" or heck, even just plain "Digital" would be a better term than new. We're not designing holograms or anything (not yet!). The mediums we are presenting on are not so new (with the exception of mobile technology)...just getting better quality.

Oi, I need to learn not to write mini-essays.