Greenwich's Student Web Designers

• Web Design and Content Planning, MA

Hi everyone, just heads up, I am a first time speaker and this is my first LWS and it's lovely to have you all here.

This is absolutely amazing, especially for me and the students who are hiding in this little corner over here. You can't see them, they're not there. But as you're here, I thought I'd talk a little bit more about Greenwich University.

So a little bit about me first, unfortunately. I was someone who previously, about a year ago, just after my gap year, tried to teach themselves website design and creation. I didn't really have a drive or a community. I'm not really a Reddit person and Mastodon scared me and I just I was stuck in my room and I was, W3 Schools was my best friend back then and still is a little bit. But I didn't have anything to further myself until I stumbled upon this course.

This course has been very enlightening for me and I've had a brilliant year with my mentors. But what I want to talk about today is hopefully what happens, what has happened and what may happen in the future. But also I want to talk about why I think it's a great alternative for any of the other courses out there and if you know anyone who's trying to self teach and are struggling, this might be a brilliant alternative.

Roughly class of 20 right now. There's not 20 of us here unfortunately. A lot of people now have gone home because it's the master season where everyone procrastinates during the summer. But we've come from all different walks of education, all different degrees. Some of us have switched completely to a different subject. We had philosophers, artists, teachers in the front here, all learning from square one with this course, which is absolutely fantastic. We are a happy bunch and I'm not being paid to say that. We are genuinely quite a nice lot. Sometimes of course we struggle to roll out of bed and you know, but sometimes we're at class and now we're early, which is crazy. But at the end of the day, we really do enjoy being here. I'm not trying to pick us up and we always walk away from our workshops more confident than when we came in. Because Slack has that new little thing where you can't see certain posts. So these are the only pictures I could find. We look kind of happy in these, but we have fun.

So as we mentioned very, very back in the beginning, we are the only university which offers a Masters in Web Design and Content Planning. The only of its kind in the UK, I find that fascinating. I would have thought that there'd be more, but no, we're the only ones. It's currently led by our wonderful mentors, David, Fabiana and Prisca, who are in this corner here. I'd recommend having a chat with them later. They're brilliant people. Bit scary, but brilliant. As well as guest appearances from alumni, as such as Emma, who you heard from earlier, who's yet again, a lovely, brilliant speaker. We actually operate from this very building a couple of floors up, which is brilliant in the morning at like 9.10am. And our lifts never work, which is amazing. But we do, like I said, we do enjoy our time here.

These are the modules we focus on during our 12 month course, we have plenty of small and large projects, experimental workshops, all of it, you name it. I personally enjoyed the Social Media and SEO course, that was my personal favourite. And we refined a lot of the skills that we learned across the course and put them to good use. Right now we're doing our major project, which if you're interested, I won't talk about it here, but you can come and chat to the students and see that we're not as scary as our mentors. All of these courses I find tie really nicely within each other and present a natural flow between them. So when we left our own devices in the summer, we actually know what we're doing, which you would hope for the 9k I'm paying.

Our first steps begin with a groundwork of the web. We explore its history and its implications of our work, how we build upon the accomplishments of those who came before us. Our lecturers are always talking about the loops in our, oops, I messed that up. Our lecturers are always kicking us in the loop about names, faces, emerging ideas in industry. From our very first lessons, we're learning about Ethan Marcotte's idea of responsive web design, the Myers reset, which has been an absolute lifesaver for me, and the ebb and flow and the concept of resiliency and change. We become fluid and flexible like the designs that they try and teach us to create. And then hopefully we actually make those designs once we concept, you know, we get CSS actually, you know, in our brains. Luckily, I think we all did that pretty well.

I want to say one of the main benefits I found of doing an academic course in web design compared to self-teaching, it's the structure that we adhere to. This structure, which is being repeated over and over again for every module. We all kind of agree that it's a very healthy working ethic, which we just love it. It's so good. It reminds us that feedback is our friend. Trying new things is one of the best things we can do as students and it allows room for mistakes. We are explored to go and use what's out there. We are allowed to go explore what's out there, but we do hard-code all of our websites. We don't use any frameworks, at least not for the first four or five months. If you want to go use Dreamweaver, which we don't use, feel free, you will get a couple of looks, but we don't touch it. We do have the freedom to choose whichever idea we like and as you grow more confident you are more than welcome to use whatever you want. If you want to use React, Bootstrap, go for it. Our studies also do include graphic design, which was my other favourite part of the lectures.

We became best friends with white space and user-centred designs. Our students wield colour and type with care. We have TypeWolf and Standby whenever we run out of font ideas and we consider the varied context in which people interact with our designs. We embrace that the web was made for everyone and our designs should accommodate to everyone. I've had the honour of working with a diverse community of students this year and it's been a long nine months, but I speak for most of my class when I say I think we have come a long way from our first websites.

Some of us have come from our home country straight into the deep end using our pure, using our passions to fuel our ideas and make them real, such as teaching children in China Mandarin using our new found web design capabilities. Others have found confidence they didn't know they had and came out of their shell, such as Assurance who unfortunately could not make it today, but I think his commitment and insight amongst his peers is incredible and commendable. Well, a lot of us had little to no prior experience working with websites. This course brought us together in ways I didn't even think were possible.

We learnt teamwork and put ourselves in each other's shoes and so much patience. Oh my God, the patience I have had with so many of my teammates. I pat us all on the back. Luckily, thanks to this course, the next wave of web designers and developers and content creators will all graduate at the end of the year with a comprehensive toolkit and an eagerness to learn. From someone that tried the self-taught method, this course has given me confidence in my abilities that self-taught never could. A course taught by industry savvy lecturers, a course delivering modules tailored around the most important principles of web design and a course that has made me proud of myself, which I think is the most important thing I could come out of that with.

I highly recommend this course if you haven't figured that out already and I find it easier to learn in a community of like-minded individuals face to face, which luckily because COVID is now, we can do that. This is now a throwback to one of our very first lessons. I'll end on a joke. I wish it was a joke. A quote from Jeremy Keith. So my lecturers do know that we do listen to their reading lists. As he said in Resilient Web Design, the future like the web is unknown, but the future like the web will be written by you, by us, the next generation of web designers. Thank you.