Throughout my career as a web designer, my core competency is and remains visual design. I love interface design challenges, logo design jobs, and the occasional print-media project. But I want to offer more. Two-thousand and seven marks the year I learn advanced web development. I'm determined to make myself valuable at any point in the development cycle, from front-to-back.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of website design is the logic puzzle one faces upon completing the final set of templates. Generating a working site from a PSD is a pretty complex process. No matter how amazing that concept or mockup looks, you need mad coding skills to make it work. My skills are all in the front-end: visual design, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It's time to bolster my skill set by delving deeper into web technologies, including Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, XML, regular expressions, etc. I want to learn how it all works in order to deliver more value to clients and employers. During 2007 I intend to pursue extensive formal study in these areas, either through university, apprenticeship, or both.

I'm very excited to start learning. Tomorrow I will attend an orientation session which kicks-off a competition for apprenticeship at a local web design company. Should I succeed in securing a seat in the program, I receive 2-months intensive training, followed by employment at the company. This overwhelming opportunity is the best way to begin learning more about advanced web technologies. Wish me luck!

Fine art envy is to designers what physics envy is to biologists. For designers, that envy leads overwhelmingly to work of just one feature: sublimely staggering beauty. Like how a Rothko fools you into thinking it's more than just color field, a website can fool you into thinking it's more than just a blog. But when style exceeds substance, should we take notice?

Take for instance 9rules Network, a well-organized site claiming to 'highlight the very best web content in the world, and package it in a nice bow for you to unwrap'. In my humble opinion, 9rules emphasizes 'bow' far more than 'content'; unwrapping is generally where the experience ends. The network's content pales in comparison to the beautiful design of its sites. Not to mention, 9rules quietly prefers white, married Judeochristian writers, most of whom are far better designers than bloggers.

I'm not saying artfulness has no place in design. It can certainly set a tone or make a meaningful stylistic reference. But it should not overwhelm other concerns, like function and content. Afterall, design is no fine art... it's ephemeral.

To build distilldesign.com, I took on myself as a client. Six months later, after many long meetings with my impossible-to-please, headstrong client, I finally arrived at an acceptable solution for his web presence. It was challenging. He put my through my paces, certainly. There was always one more tweak. I soon found myself under an avalanche of his tweak requests. But enough is enough.

The trouble is knowing when to say so. When you're your own customer, you have 24/7 realtime access to all his thoughts. Occasionally, during the course of designing distilldesign.com, I would wake up in the middle of the night with yet another tweak, scrambling to find a piece of paper to write it on. A good client never calls at 2am. I guess I was a bit overzealous with my designer.

The challange is finding the balance between: it works, it's beautiful, and it could be better. It could always be better. But it will never be perfect. Hopefully, though, it will always be beautiful, and it will always work.