001. <h1>Hello World</hi>
“Indiscriminate button pushing”
This was always the creative director’s answer right after he’d walked up to my desk, lightly pushed me to the side and started clattering away at the keyboard. Putting an additional string of aoie;orhasdonohif;qeijf laden jibber-ish into whatever document I’d happened to be working on at that moment.
I was 22 years old, and spending my first two months in the “big city” of Calgary working an internship under the creative director named Reg at his new media consultancy shop as part of my community college diploma in what we then called Web Design.
Back in 2004 web was still pretty damn new, except for the most cutting edge tech enthusiast no one was really online until 1995–96 depending on who you ask. At this point, even the most experienced web designers/developers of the world would have a hard time claiming 5–10 years of experience in HTML. I’d had my first exposure to HTML tags just 7 years earlier, back in Brandon Manitoba on yet another unrelentingly cold winter’s day on the prairies.
<h1>Hello world!</h1>
Like thousands of developers before, and thousands yet to come that simple exuberant statement “Hello world!” written in a notepad and saved as ‘.HTML’ would be my first exposure to my eventual career path.
It was the winter of 1997, I was in the eighth grade and we were having a workshop day known as “light up your learning”. Students would forgo their regular classes for the afternoon and select a topic they were interested in exploring that day. For some, this was a field trip to the university, a specialized writing class, an afternoon of (FILM!) photography, and for me, it was the web design course thought by my homeroom teacher.
“Alright everyone, this here is going to be your first webpage, I need you to open up notepad and write the following <h1>Hello World!</h1> and save it.”
“Now go find your text file, right-click on it and select rename, we’re going change the name of untitled.txt to index.html”
I thought to myself “Wait… we can do that? Won’t that break something? Will we get in trouble?”, as I followed these foreign-sounding directions.
“Ok, now double click index.html and Netscape should open up”
Hello World! was now staring back at me in heavily pixellated times new roman from a flickering CRT monitor with the animated “Netscape” logo in the top right-hand side of the screen.
“Congratulations, you have just created your first webpage, and with it joined the legion of programmers who started their journey with that same Hello World text you’re looking at right now”
Over the next few hours we walked through the basics of HTML, opening < and closing > tags, styling, colours, and most importantly… animated gifs. Dozens of gifs, gifs of flying toasters, spinning logos, bouncing arrows, cartoon devils, and construction workers to let you know the page you were viewing was under construction.
The deliverable from that afternoon was to be a series of webpages to be added to our k-8’s school’s website. Each student in the class was to create a “Light up your learning” sample page to showcase our newly minted skillset in placing <blink> tags and tiled background images into text documents. Being a rebellious 15 year old I of course had to include the Beavis and Butthead gifs I had found in a folder of random gifs along with some relevant quotes from the show… the school opted not to publish my page along with the rest.
Although the very first page of HTML I’d ever written being deemed ‘not fit to publish’ by the administration I was still enamored with the skills we’d learned that day.
“Just by changing the file extension of a simple text file, I can redefine everything about that file? The text style, the background colours, where the pictures go, and then I can publish it to the whole damn world?” I was blown away by the possibilities.
For the next few years, I’d create & publish fan pages for the bands I loved, Nirvana, NOFX, The Offspring, Marilyn Manson, but mostly it was Nine Inch Nails. With each passing month, I’d discover a new technique, background music! iFrames! Image rollovers! Rows and rows and rows of gifs! Each one of these new techniques requiring a top to bottom redesign of these fan pages, with each new revision uploaded with care to places like Geocities and Angelfire.
Despite all of this, when I graduated high school in the spring of 2001 the thought of turning this hobby into a career seemed out of reach when you’re starting out in the world from a city of 40,000 in the middle of the Canadian Prairies. “Web design” was still a bleeding edge career at this point, heck most people still owned clothes older than the term itself, this could just be a fad.
Against my mother’s wishes, I choose to take a year off rather than go to college or university, at the moment I believe she was a little devastated by this choice. “I’ve read stories, most kids who try to take a year off never go back!” she claimed.
She made me a deal “You can live here rent-free as long as you’re in school, rent is $125/month”.
Did I mention this was 20 years ago?
Either way, I took a year off and worked in the produce department of a local grocery store while saving money for my post-secondary education, whatever it ended up being.
This is a special selection program.
- As part of the special selection process, all applicants must attend a compulsory orientation and submit a portfolio of original work.
I wish I could say I remember the exact moment I choose to go into professional design during this year of slinging produce boxes from the truck into the store cooler. That I’d had some life-altering epiphany that slinging code would be easier than telling customers “no sir, I’m afraid we’re not getting any more pumpkins today” at 4:45 on Halloween.
But the truth is I waffled around the decision, a lot. I knew that I wanted to pursue something creative, and I had a stack of college/university brochures at home with a litany of fine art/graphic design/new media options outlined. I also had my mom in my ear as I paid my “rent” each month “wouldn’t it be easier to make a living with your brain than with your body doing manual labour?”
As I mulled over my options I became increasingly overwhelmed and intimidated by the options, do I move to Winnipeg and get a bachelor of fine arts? Spend all that money and move to the big city? I’m just a punk kid from Brandon, they’ll eat me alive in Winnipeg.
Brandon University also had a fine arts program, but the entry requirements seemed well above my high school transcript, and truthfully the program seemed a bit stuffy. While Winnipeg was a busting big city with big new ideas and a young vibrant art scene.
At some point during this year I ran into a high school friend of mine Calvin, he had enrolled in the Web Design Diploma Program at Assiniboine Community College the fall before and spoke highly of it.
“We’re taking a ton of photoshop classes, but also doing some writing and 3d modeling. We even had a nude figure drawing class.” he told me.
It sounded awesome, the descriptions he gave sounded like a far-removed world from the stuffy world of academia, while still offering exposure to some of the more refined points of the longer programs.
Looking back at the curriculum now, it strikes me as primarily a “tools” course with a dash of fine art theory sprinkled in.
Web Design Diploma curriculum circa 2002
| Year 1
- 3D Animation
- Interactive Media Writing 1 & 2
- Art History
- Multimedia
- Digital Audio and Video
- Shockwave Content Creation
- Digital Audio Techniques
- Software Applications
- Digital Imaging and Graphics 1 & 2
- Topics and Issues in Design
- Digital Video Techniques
- Visual Design 1 & 2
- Dreamweaver
- Web Design 1 & 2
- Flash 1
| Year 2
- Practicum (8 weeks May-June)
- Adobe After Effects
- Internet Scripting
- Computer Operating Systems
- Internet Server Management
- Creating E-Documentation
- New Media Trends and Issues
- E-Commerce Applications
- Shockwave with Lingo
- E-Commerce Concepts
- Streaming Rich Media
- E-Learning Applications
- Web Site Portfolio Project
- Flash 2
It was the art history, digital imaging, and visual design classes that sealed the deal for me, although I’m not actually sure we covered internet server management. Best of all, I could afford it while staying at my parent’s home for free for the entire two-year duration of the course, thanks Mom & Dad!
To top it all off there was the elitist allure of needing to submit a portfolio, they weren’t going to let just anyone in, you need to display some kind of artistic talent to get through these doors.
The desire to fit in with a group of creative elites held a great allure for me back then and would continue to be a rather unhealthy draw throughout my career.
But we’ll get to that later, back in 2001 it was the motivation I used to build out my portfolio I’d used with my application. I was determined this would be the best damn portfolio I could build, the most creative, the most cutting edge, the most functional.
My ace in the hole for this life-altering document? My big make it or break it moment?
HTML frames, and consistent navigation from page to page.
Yup, no more mystery meat drill down navigations, this website would have well thought out sections, and the ability to get from every other page.
I can’t remember much else about this portfolio, other than it had a black background, white text, and included samples from my high school fine arts class… and very likely a few animated gifs or badges recommending the best browser experience.
A few weeks passed and I got my acceptance letter from ACC, I was in! Along with 24 other students who’d passed their rigorous portfolio review, they’d bumped the number of students up to 25 from the original plan for 20 students… creative elites.
When I told my parents I’d been accepted and I needed to scrape up my tuition money they were over the moon, neither of them had finished their post-secondary, so having me return to school instead of continuing my career in produce was music to their ears. I’m not sure they could have been any happier to return the $1,500 I’d paid in “rent” that last year.
A blank piece of paper
“The most intimidating thing in the entire world is a blank piece of paper, so just put something on it. Anything, a dot, a line, a disgusting bit of shadow, it doesn’t matter, anything to transform it from a blank piece of paper.” – Peter Lindsay ACC instructor
The next two years would be a whirlwind of design, art, development, writing, and 3D modeling classes. We dabbled in a bit of everything, I got my first exposure to digital photography, my first exposure to audio and video editing (I still can’t do either), and hours of exposure to the prevailing web technology of the day… adobe flash.
Flash sites utilizing complex motion graphics were all the rave back then, with designers like Joshua Davis and Shane Mielke pushing the envelope of what the web could be with sites like Pray Station and 2 Advanced.
My first few portfolios were heavily influenced (see ripped off) by these sites, with over the top explosions of animation and intrusive bleeps & blips with every hover or click.
Flash was truly terrible in the same way a teenager’s first car is terrible. Objectively speaking it did nothing well, but it got you to the party.
Another highlight of this period was our class trip to Toronto, where we would be visiting several cutting edge interactive/webshops to see how the pros worked. What we saw on the trip blew me away, design studios filled with rows & rows of shiny, brightly coloured macs. Shop owners in Motörhead t-shirts talking us through their production process for custom snowboard graphics. George Strombolopoise at Much Music explaining how their open office concept in media production was a pre-curser to the web studios of the day.
I came back from that trip motivated to do two things, join this burgeoning industry while it was on it’s way up… and get the hell out of Brandon as soon as I could.
As we approached the end of our second year we started lining up our required internships, our original entry class of 25 had been whittled down to just four at this point.
Many of the students had dropped out when the coding became too challenging, but to be honest, I’m still not sure what purpose writing macro media shockwave code out by with pen & paper served. Other’s had left when the creative endeavors such as journalistic writing took them away from learning more CSS, or a better way to load content into their flash sites.
Watching a group of two dozen classmates dwindle down to just four of us fed right into my young ego, as being one of the last few standing after two years further convinced me I was joining an elite group. Those who could rightfully grasp the brass ring and use the title I so coveted… designer.
Drawing boxes for money – In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic I started to draft up a long form career retrospective on my 15+ years working in digital design. Looking back on how the world and industry have changed since the first line of HTML I wrote.
I wasn’t sure if anyone would ever read it, and there’s still a large chunk of the story yet to be written. But in the midst of the 4th wave of the pandemic, it could be a nice distraction from the doom scrolling. Stay tuned for future chapters.
