Food For Thought

So You’ve Mastered CSS. What’s Next?

Feel like you are coming close to mastering CSS? If so, what is your next big step?

Planning your next move and thinking ahead is an important part of advancing in your career. As we all know, time is money and we should all be focusing on how to spend our time in the most efficient and productive manner.

Some will choose to dig deeper into the front-end development aspect, where maybe mastering javascript is the next step for them. Some will choose to take the design route, and become more familiar with Photoshop and Illustrator, and some may choose to get into Flash.

What Some of the Leading Web Gurus Had to Say…

Chris Coyier

The question “what should I learn next?” should be answered by the person asking it.
Every skill on the web is useful. Every skill on the web is worth learning if you have the time. In all likelihood you probably have a project you’d like to be working on, or an idea you would love to create. What is it going to take to make it the best it can be? Learn that.
If this person just absolutely has no idea about what to do… go with JavaScript.

www.CSS-Tricks.com

David Walsh

It has to be, must be, needs to be diving right into javascript, preferably MooTools or jQuery. CSS is a great skill to master, but CSS and javascript are slowly becoming one skill due to the lack of evolution with Browser support and CSS3.
Javascript. No doubt in my mind.

www.davidwalsh.name

Chris Spooner

One of the great things about web design is there’s always a new path to take in order to learn new skills. With a good knowledge of CSS, learning the basics of the jQuery Javascript framework comes quite naturally, especially with the aid of online tutorials. The jQuery syntax uses CSS selectors to target specific page elements, making it easy for someone with good CSS knowledge to get to grips with. After a short while of learning the various commands and effects, some really great visual additions can be added to your site designs.

On the other hand, there’s also the news of the web moving forward with the upcoming releases of CSS3 and HTML5, both of which bring new features to the table. Now is a great time to learn these new features to stay up to date with your skill level and stay on top of the industry, making for a highly employable skillset.

www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk

Alen Grakalic

My advice is to move on to JS :) Not only has JS became an integral part of modern websites, but with mastering JS he/she will become a complete front-end specialist. With design and css/xhtml/js coding skills one can take any type of front end job. That is something that I was aiming at the beginning. Now I have all kinds of requests, from designing interfaces, css “slicing” to creating JavaScript snippets.

www.CssGlobe.com

Steven Snell

My opinion is that HTML and CSS are (obviously) necessary regardless of what kind of web design you do. After that, I think it’s helpful to choose something that will help you in some type of specialization. It could be JavaScript, Flash etc. For me it was PHP and WordPress. I’m far from a PHP expert, but with WordPress you don’t have to be. Developing exceptional Photoshop or Illustrator skills could be another option. After HTML and CSS I think you should look at what you really want to do as a designer, because most of us don’t have time to learn everything.

www.VandelayDesign.com

Cameron Moll

I’ve long suggested great user experiences are built on three things:
interaction, graphic design, and communication. CSS is about the representation of an experience using markup as the tool, namely facilitating interaction and bringing graphic design to life within a browser.

If one feels he/she has mastered that tool, I would suggest he/she focus on developing skills that allow for meaningful communication to take place within the user experience — visual and verbal communication between the user and the interface, and between the user and the organization providing that experience.

www.CameronMoll.com

Jacob Gube

The next step to fully “grokking’ CSS is to focus on writing code that works across all browsers.As you get into more complicated designs, you’ll quickly realize that it’s often difficult to write CSS that’s supported across most browsers. This is the fundamental difference between new CSS authors and more experienced ones: the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. Let me tell you now, I’ve spent countless hours debugging CSS when I first got started – but don’t worry, it gets much easier with experience. The only real way to learn is to experiment and explore – so don’t give up right away.

I also think JavaScript (client-side scripting) is a good thing to learn once you’ve gotten a good understanding of HTML/CSS. Learning JS will help you create more robust and interactive web interfaces – and understanding CSS will help you learn JS quicker, especially when you get into working with the DOM.

www.sixrevisions.com

Dmitry Fadeev

Your topic is interesting though because this happened to me a while back. When I mastered CSS/HTML I grew bored of building the same templates and front-end pages, so I decided to learn a bit more. I’ve gotten into Ruby on Rails, and after a little while can now put together some little web apps that work. I think if a designer has an interest in learning more, expanding the skillset from just front-end design to also back-end would be a serious bonus because you’ll depend less and less on others to deliver the whole solution or fix the whole problem.

One other thing I’ve gotten into is system administration. Having bought myself a VPS at Slicehost (a virtual private server with just a Linux OS intalled) I had to learn how to install everything through shh — things like the database, the web server, Ruby, Rails, etc.
Learning how to manage an Apache web server is quite tedious, but it gives you a greater understanding of how everything works and fits together.

One thing I’m not great at is Javascript. Actually, I’m pretty terrible here :) I’ve bought myself a book but still haven’t managed to read it. I think logically, javascript should probably be the next move up from CSS/HTML front-end design. Don’t just learn javascript though, download a js library like jQuery and learn how that works.
Something like jQuery will make it much easier to put together dynamic elements on your sites.

So yeah, I think web designers should start learning some languages like PHP, Python or Ruby. You’ll quickly get to a level where you may not be able to code a complex application, but at least you can look at the code and understand what’s happening — and edit it. For example, a front-end designer who doesn’t know PHP at all may design a nice WordPress theme, but they’ll have to work within the constraints of the theme they’re editing. If that designer knows a bit of PHP, they can edit the code PHP code that’s there and customize the theme ever further. Many programming languages aren’t very different from each other either, so once you learn one, chances are you’ll understand the code in another language.

I think system administration is another good skill. It’s pretty boring and complex, though not too difficult to learn. If a web designer knows how to set up their own servers and tweak Apache, then running their own sites becomes much easier. You don’t need to host your sites on oversold shared hosting providers — just grab a slice from Linode or Slicehost (who actually have a set of guides to get you started, even if you don’t know anything at all) for about $20 a month, and you can set up for yourself a really fast web server that has exactly the software and servers you need.

Flash? I don’t know :) I think we’re seeing a move away from Flash in the recent years towards CSS/HTML with Javascript.

www.UsabilityPost.com

Conclusion

I believe ultimately it is up to the designer’s goals that will lead them to the right direction. Like I’ve stated in my previous article “Passion – It’s What Drives Your Success“, allow your passion to lead your career.

…and You?

Which road will you take and why?