I have been working in technology of one kind or another now for at least ten years or more. And as a Black technology guy, I have noticed the staggering absence of black folks in technology and nowhere has that felt more prevalent than in the web design industry. To help underscore my point, in the two years I have been teaching web design at Moore College, I have finally had my first student of color this term: an African-American female student. Wow.

When one takes a little time to peruse the ‘Net and look around at all the usual trendy sites on ground-breaking design [Zeldman, AListApart, Eric Meyer, Dan Benjamin just to name a few], I see no black faces. No faces of color. And let me state, before continuing, I do not believe that any of these individuals or web sites I may link to here in this article are out to purposely make this a reality or in anyway have had a direct hand in creating this absence. Rather, I wish to illustrate that when we look around for bright faces of web design, they’re white, not black.

Most of what I study is looking at constructs and how they’re nested in social contexts. Asking how did this come to be? Why? How? Where is it going? When I ply these same questions to Blackamericans and web design, I am left feeling puzzled and bewildered at the absence of one prominent black web designer. It could very well be that the talented black web designers are all too busy making beautiful web sites and not taking public credit for their work or maybe it’s something else.

When we look around at other sectors of society as to why there is a woeful absence of black folks in participation, that conditions are usually fairly clear. And let me say here that the follow is a hypothesis, a best guest, a starting point of looking at this issue. I welcome concrete feedback.

I do not believe that black folks are absent from web design due to a conscious effort to disengage from it. Most likely it may have to do with socio-economic issues. For blacks who are hailing from deprived urban centers, web design may simply not be on their radar. Not having the money to invest in computers, Internet access [preferably high-speed], and an education that would point them in the direction of design [web or otherwise], all lead me to think that this may be part of the problem. So, when philanthropic organizations are looking to invest money in these depressed areas, are they thinking to encourage blacks to take part of the digital revolution and get involved in the web or is this too off the radar.

With that being sad, I did come across a posting on a web site regarding a web summit/conference, where on the advertising poster, it featured a caricature of a black man along with the words, “Pimp’d“.

I found this a curiosity as it featured a stereotypical portrayal of an African-American, playing as a pimp, with a fedora hat and a drink in his hand. My immediate thought was not that it was inherently racist, but that how many black web designers would be attending this event? My best guess would be not many, and yet they have chosen a sort of “black mascot” to represent the coolness factor of the event. My second thought was that it was inherently racist.

So I put these thoughts out here, as a call to other black web designers. I would be curious to hear your experiences in this industry, on or off the record.

Addendum

The web site, A List Apart, has revealed some findings in their 2008 survey. I welcome you to look at the list but for the sake of this post, you can see that just a mere 1.2% off web designers they surveyed were black. Amazing that essentially one out of every hundred people who might attend their event might be Blackamerican yet they feel the best way to promote the coolness of their even is through showcasing a stereotypical portrayal of a black man.

Charming. To the last…

One of the most common questions I receive every semester from students is how can they “really” learn web design. Most are set aback by the daunting task of learning to hand code. Let it be said: “I hear your cry! I feel your pain.”

Simply put, there’s no short cut to learning [x]html or css. In truth, it is a flaky language and add to it the inconsistencies that the various browsers have when interpreting the code, it makes for an arduous journey to say the least. I do, however, have a couple of thoughts on some methods that may be helpful.

• Spend time at it; preferably a lot! I am only half joking here. Like anything else one wishes to become proficient at, there’s no short cut to a time-intensive discipline, and web design is certainly that. Like the kung-fu student who carries buckets of water up a slippery slope at the beckoning of his master, s/he may wonder, “why in the hell am I doing this?” And yet, when the student has developed rock-hard muscles, toughness, endurance, and more importantly, has digested the moves or techniques such that they become second nature, all those long trips up the stairs become something to laugh and tell his or her children about some day.
• Each of us moves at a different pace. Some of us will pick up components of this at different speeds than others. So be patient with yourself.
• One of the best ways to learn how something works is to take it apart and put it back together again. While there are a number of fine books on the market they one, often lag behind what’s “cool” now, and two, never provide the endless number of design possibilities and configurations that the web can. So in many ways, it’s your biggest and cheapest bookstore or library. Crack upon a site, look at what they’re doing, take it apart, line by line, and reassemble it.

Oh, yeah, and do your homework.

That being said, let me make a comment or two on software, specifically applications such as Abobe’s Dreamweaver. While Dreamweaver is a wonderful and powerful tool, it does provide the beginning student with a number of handicaps. One such handicap is the auto-filling of code. Many if not most of my students have trouble grasping and remembering all the code that should go where and when. Dreamweaver, though the powerful tool it maybe be, is still only a tool. A wrench can never tell you what to tighten up or loosen. So it is with Dreamweaver. It can never tell you what is and is not semantic - such decisions need be made by you, the designer. It also handicaps you in that it auto flls your code which can make it much harder for you to get over the hump of having to memorize code.

So what do I recommend then? Well, there are a number of fine products out there but one that has caught my eye as of recently is Flow, by Extendmac. More than just a simple FTP client, Flow can edit content/files directly on the server as well as allow for previewing. The text is color coded to help for identifying but it does not auto-fill. In my opinion, it’s a great tool and I also dig the interface. It’s only available for the Mac. If you’re on a PC, I recommend Filezilla, configured to use Notepad as the viewer/editor.

Hopefully, with these few tips, you the beginner can begin to overcome some of those initial humps.