Being professionals

I am using the same title with Eric Meyer since I need a common ground to start from and Meyer’s post is an excellent one.

Let me show you the flip side of the coin. Here in Greece people who care about being professionals in web design or sticking to web standards are a weak minority. As far as I know there hasn’t been even a conference about web design ever. And I am not very optimistic for the future.

We

are isolated. Universities just don’t care. Companies mostly seek for flashing elements on the screen and people around you tend to believe that designing is something everyone could do. Jeff Croft wrote about it much better than me. When I read his post I had a bitter smile on my face. I couldn’t believe that same things happen elsewhere too.

The thing is that creating an organization for designers would be something we really need. However, even if I could join such a group I couldn’t afford participating in seminars, workshops etc around the world since noone would assist me. Even if I could prove my skills to the local web market noone from the market would invest some money on me to become better. Being a freelancer and covering your expenses is out of the question in Greece. We remain helpless and the only chance to become better is to find the gurus and follow them by visiting their blogs and listening to what they have to say.

This April Molly E. Holzschlag announced an analogous effort from the Web Standards Project talking about an International Liaison Group. To my surprise this endeavor stuck and I am wondering: if not WaSP then who?

I don’t question great designers’ intensions because these people are open minded and they show it every day. With this post I am asking them to keep trying closing the gap because this benefits all. Since they are more powerful than me they can use the relevant mechanisms which bring all of us closer to each other.