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Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS
Andy Budd was in Melbourne as the keynote speaker for the Web Directions UX conference this week. SitePoint's Matthew Magain spent some time chatting to him about blogging, design, CSS frameworks, careers on the web, usability testing, the future of the Web, and much more.
SitePoint: Thanks for taking some time to talk to us Andy! Let me begin by saying that your blog, along with Drew McLelland's All In The Head, is one of the first blogs that I began following, many years ago. Can you tell me how your blog has shaped your career on the Web?
Oh wow, cool. It's probably quite difficult to say to what level it's had an effect, because obviously there are a whole bunch of things that have happened.
But I do think it's been fairly important. I started blogging in the UK about web standards quite early on, and at the time I only really knew of two other people who were blogging about the same stuff in the UK, and those turned out to be Jeremy Keith and Richard Rutter, with whom I later set up my business, Clearleft. And after a while I discovered a few other blogs, like Drew's blog, and a few other people started doing similar things.
It was a fairly early stage, so my other peers were people like Doug Bowman, Dave Shea, Cameron Moll and those guys. So I guess I got lumped in with those people, and there's definitely kudos that came with that. Rich, Jeremy and I were the people in the UK doing similar stuff.
But I also think a lot of it was luck -- a case of being in the right place at the right time. I was really interested in web standards, and I really just started blogging as a way of helping sort through my own thought processes. When I discovered something, rather than keeping it to myself, I'd post it up on my blog, because I thought that if it helped me, there might be somebody else out there that it might help.
I guess like most bloggers, it was all driven by fairly altruistic reasons. At least in the early days, I think most people blogged for fairly altruistic reasons. These days you get a lot of people who blog to get fame and fortune, which, frankly, I think if you want to get fame or fortune, you should learn to play the guitar or learn to act. I don't think you're going to get famous by blogging.
But yeah, I guess I got reasonably well-known through my blog. At one stage it was getting an enormous amount of traffic, and I guess in part the ability to go and speak at conferences came out of that. Not directly, but when I approached SXSW, for example, to see if I could speak, I'm guessing the fact that I was a known entity helped that. Although SXSW has always been quite good at breaking new talents; they've always been quite good at getting people who haven't spoken before to speak.
I guess when I wrote a proposal for my book, CSS Mastery, the fact that I had some speaking experience and I had a blog confirmed to my publisher that there was at least some kind of market there. As you would know as a publisher, it's a little bit risky having a completely unknown person write a book when there's no defined market. Whereas at least people who read my blog were probably more likely to buy CSS Mastery.
So I guess it has all kind of fed off each other. The more speaking I do these days, I suppose my blog is really poorly looked after, I have to admit. I'm lucky if I manage to write one or two blog posts a month. And I feel really bad, because I really want to write stuff, and there's loads of stuff that I want to write.
But with running Clearleft, organising dConstruct, and doing all this speaking means my available time is quite tight. I think it's quite sad that a lot of my peers who I mentioned earlier -- Dave Shea, Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm -- have also found themselves in a similar situation where the amount they're blogging has really kind of trailed off in the last 18 months, as we all end up working harder and doing loads of stuff.
SP: Do you think that part of that might be that everything to say about CSS has already been said?
Oh, absolutely, yeah. I haven't really been talking about CSS on my blog for a good couple of years, and my focus is much more in terms of usability and user experience design. I mean CSS was always just one narrow part of what I was interested in anyway, but it was the part that I was learning at the time, so naturally it was the part I was blogging about. And I think you're right -- I think CSS, to a certain extent, has run its course -- at least the people like your Doug Bowmans and your Dave Sheas -- have discovered all of the interesting stuff that we're likely to discover.
So the people who are blogging about CSS now are people who are just learning about it, and discovering it fresh. And there always needs to be that kind of stuff -- there's always going to be people learning, so there's always going to be the need to learn from your peers or from people in similar situations. But for me, the CSS thing is kind of like a done deal, to a certain extent.
SP: You mentioned your business partners before, Jeremy and Richard, who are identities on the Web in their own right. How does the clash of egos work under the Clearleft umbrella?
Pretty well actually. The reason we came together to work on Clearleft together is because we all have fairly similar beliefs about how the Web should be. We all believe in semantic markup and web standards ... we believe in good design and usability and user experience. So we all have those similar overlapping interests. Individually, though, we have things that we are passionate about.
So Rich is amazingly passionate about good typography, and good accessibility, and he's a really awesome interaction designer ... really solid. He gets the work done -- he's like the backbone of Clearleft, really. He's the one who does all the work, and Jeremy and I take all the credit!
I'm really interested and passionate about user experience design and I'm fairly good with the business side of stuff as well, which Jeremy and Rich aren't really interested in. So I like speaking to people, I like going and meeting with clients and explaining what we do, and gettin passionate about all the great stuff that the Web has to offer.
Jeremy is just super smart. I mean, he is really on the ball. He knows his code and his JavaScript, but also he knows his classical references and that kind of stuff. He went to art college, so he's got that kind of background. Plus he's an awesome speaker.
And so it kind of works really well. Obviously we have our own different approaches to certain things, but generally, philosophically, we mesh really well.
SP: So there's not too much butting of heads then?
Oh God no, not at all. I mean there are a few little "catch points" that always spark discussion, and one of them is the "fixed vs. fluid" discussion. And there are always differing opinions around that. But that's because it is one of those "How many camels can you get through the eye of a needle?" type situations. There's no right answer, there's just opinions. Generally, it's those kind of classic discussions that come up over and over again.