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I Want To Teach Web Design For Free
- acangiano 15y agoHave you considered teaching online with a service like Udemy.com? You'd certainly reach a broader audience.
- shahedkhan30 15y agoYes, I would love to be one of your students, if you would teach online. Brooklyn is a good choice, but if you teach online, you'll reach a larger audience.
- jenius 15y agoHey guys - thanks for all your support and comments. I would be happy to broadcast the class online, but would still like to have people actually there for it. I'll see if I can record it and post after, or stream live. Thanks for your suggestions, and shoot me an email if you want me to keep you updated!
- div 15y agoGreat idea. I'm from Europe, but I'd love it if you could stream these sessions too. Maybe look into streaming via justin.tv or something ? VOD's would be pretty sweet as well.
- cme 15y agoI'd be down for an online class too!
- alxeder 15y agomozilla's school of webcraft is also a good way to teach online for free http://p2pu.org/en/schools/school-of-webcraft/ http://p2pu.org/en/schools/school-of-webcraft/
- edtechdev 15y agoYes this is the one I'd probably recommend. They may already have an html5 course. There are also wiki sites like wikispaces.com or you can use wordpress.com or there are sites like instructables.com For what it's worth, here's my course on web development: http://internetdev.usu.edu/notes http://internetdev.usu.edu/notes We just cover the basics of HTML and CSS, and then jump into using a content management system (drupal). I hosted students' drupal sites myself, but there is also this free drupal hosting site: http://drupalgardens.com/ http://drupalgardens.com/ For the basic HTML/CSS part, I tried out http://kodingen.com/ http://kodingen.com/ to let students do everything in the browser since the computers are locked down here. It has some issues, but worked okay.
- cidermonk3y 15y agoIf it were me I would leave the teaching of Javascript and jQuery to later on after you've helped them build an application that works (i.e. after all the backend stuff is hooked up). I hope you find somewhere to get set up :)
- jenius 15y agoIt won't be anything too intense, just a couple of front-end tweaks to get peoples' feet wet and show them the power that jquery has. If all goes well, I could cover it more in depth in a later class.
- trin_ 15y ago" best practices" like using fonts that look rubbish on anything but OSX?
- SamColes 15y agoAnyone have a screenshot on OSX for comparison? I'm on Windows and I think the font looks fine...
- rlm 15y agoWith javascript enabled: http://cl.ly/0Q263x2u1t2N1d3l1B3f http://cl.ly/0Q263x2u1t2N1d3l1B3f With javascript disabled: http://cl.ly/3g1e0P3Y1b2X332B0Q0v http://cl.ly/3g1e0P3Y1b2X332B0Q0v
- lzm 15y agoIt's basically unreadable on Windows: http://i.imgur.com/qukor.png http://i.imgur.com/qukor.png
- jenius 15y agoHey all - sorry about the font problems on Windows. This is just a one page site, and I'm using a font straight from the Google Web Fonts directory. I only have a mac at home, so that was how I tested it. I will certainly be more careful next time, and with a larger site would absolutely test on all browsers and operating systems.
- Hisoka 15y agoWhat causes this issue? I want to know in the future to avoid something like this? Is it because you use custom ttfs or something?
- jenius 15y agoThe issue was caused by a webkit font rendering fix. Make sure to remove all text-stroke and text-shadow declarations for windows - these thin out the font and improve rendering in osx, but ruin it for windows (no surprise)
- roadnottaken 15y agoWhat's your audience? In my experience it's easy to teach someone how to build a simple website, but much harder to teach things like file-transferring, hosting, image formats, etc. However your topics seemed more-advanced than the basics, so I wonder who your students would be?
- shrikant 15y agoCompletely agree. Way back in the day (late 90s) I decided to go hipster and hand-code my own static site in Notepad ("Suck it, Allaire HomeSite and HoTMeTaL!"), and put it up for all the world to see. I didn't dig around too much into what would be needed - after all, I had taught myself HTML and relative paths! After a week of "Edit, Ctrl+S, Alt+Tab, F5, Repeat", I was finally happy with the (now shitty, then awesome) finished product. And then realised I had no clue how to get it up on any website, much less my own. That was when I truly learnt how anything ought to be learnt (end-to-end). And also that I probably wasn't as smart as I thought :( TL;DR: created website without knowing how websites really work.
- jenius 15y agoHey guys, like I mentioned in the summary of the class, I will be completely covering deployment, including how to upload and deploy a full site both in rails and for static files. Cheers!
- navs 15y agoI'd love if someone did something similar to this in the Auckland (New Zealand) area.
- duopixel 15y agoThere are plenty of co-working spaces in NYC, I'm sure if you get in touch the would be thrilled to lend you a teaching space in exchange for easy access to the course. http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/16583629/CoworkingNewYorkCity http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/16583629/CoworkingNewYorkC...
- pitdesi 15y agoTry http://www.generalassemb.ly/ http://www.generalassemb.ly/ They have a nice space and this would be a great way for them to reach out to the community.
- jenius 15y agoA friend just suggested them to me this morning! I definitely will be in touch, very likely it will be held there : ) Thanks!
- rockarage 15y agoI will recommend Wix Lounge, it's a free workspace that also has tech and design workshop, your goal fits well with what they do. See: http://www.wixlounge.com/ http://www.wixlounge.com/ http://blog.wix.com/2011/06/the-wix-lounge-nycs-hot-spot-for-your-events/ http://blog.wix.com/2011/06/the-wix-lounge-nycs-hot-spot-for...
- jk215 15y agoIts awesome that you would take the time out to set up some free classes but I think you would need to move some things around in this syllabus. Basics of Graphic Design - Great starting point. No arguments here. Learning HTML (html5) only - I dont agree with this. HTML5 is not that widely adopted yet to be a sole basis of HTML learning. It often still requires JS just to make it render correctly across all browsers. Using the HTML5 doctype and teaching HTML5 as what-is-to-come is great, but it shouldnt be the basis. Especially if you are looking to teach cross-browser compatibility and best practices. Javascript/JQuery - Sounds about right. Databases / MVC / RoR - This is where you kind of blur the line between teaching "Web Design" and "Web Development". This should be an optional split. If you want to continue learning the development side you go this route, if they want to stay design side, go a different route. There is really no reason for a designer to know about how MVC works. Deployment - The basics of deployment would be great for everyone but advanced RoR, Django style deployments shouldnt be apart of a normal course.
- jenius 15y agoThanks for your intelligent and thoughtful review. To respond: I am going to stick with html5. I personally support progressiveness in design, and that means if someone is using IE6 and/or no javascript, I do not support this (and neither does google, wordpress, and a host of other large companies). As long as you have javascript turned on, the simple inclusion of modernizr makes html5 100% functional. I think it would be a best practices fail NOT to teach html5. I always have coded in html5, and so has the web agency I work at, and anyone else I know in web dev. On the dev, you're totally right, but I disagree with the statement "There is really no reason for a designer to know about how MVC works". The more a designer knows about development, the better they will be to work with. I don't think there should be a split between design and development, it's good to dabble in both. Of course, everything is optional - if someone was very stubborn about not knowing anything about dev, they could skip the class. I will be covering quick basic RoR deployment through Heroku, not advanced rails deploys. That would be for a later course ; )
- eropple 15y ago"Progressiveness in design" only works when people are actually able to view it correctly. Given the fluctuating state of HTML5 at present, I'm reasonably sure you're just introducing additional complexity and points of failure unless you are teaching exhaustively only the exact features that work correctly, everywhere. This is not a particularly large set. Now, I'd say something very different if HTML5 actually worked correctly everywhere, or even most places. But here's the thing--indoctrinating people into a JavaScript dependency like modernizr to fuel your desire to use a standard that isn't completely implemented anywhere is, frankly, terrible: a much more important lesson to drive home is "look, use progressive enhancement," not "look, HTML5 is awesome!", and making modernizr a dependency is the exact opposite of smart. Yes, your "web agency" might do this--but that doesn't make them very bright, either. It's rule #1 of responsive web design: start with the simplest base case, and progressively enhance from there. If you want to really teach people how to benefit themselves by being able to write this stuff, I'd strongly recommend starting there--not with the high-end "look at my buzzwords and adopt them." Simple is good--really.
- vladsanchez 15y agoJeffAcademy.com... Clear enough? You have a golden opportunity! Good luck! =D
- jenius 15y agohahaha maybe if this first class is successful :-P