It may be fun and interesting to take a look at it over a coffee sometimes. However, I’ve never been a fan of discussing the past since there are more important matters in life — the future and the present moment. First things first; what’ll happen in 2009? I don’t usually speculate around technological advances or trend shifts but let me humor you with a few lines on this special occasion.
Web design will continue to grow, no surprise there. We may see it heading in new directions, a development some people will hate and others enjoy. As web design gets more detailed and sophisticated, as if it isn’t already, more knowledge and deeper direction will be needed.
It may seem as if the purpose of humankind is to complicate. Many years ago, web design was just that, web design. Then it was divided into design and development. We added project managers and creative directors. Design became interaction design and visual design. Development was split into front-end and back-end, and so on. It’s how we move forward and redefine, raising the bar of what great web design is.
We will continue to specialize and the managers and directors will face a greater challenge in doing what they do — manage and direct this specialization. We already have art directors, marketing directors, creative directors, technical directors and perhaps we’ll invent a few more. This is progress and whether it is good or bad is a superfluous discussion since we have the choice to go in our own direction.
What about the creative and technical aspects that most are interested in? We won’t be seeing anything unnatural here either. Can’t fight nature now, can we? People working hard on web standards will continue to make progress. Scripting languages and frameworks will add features, become more stable and something new will inevitably spawn somewhere.
Adobe Flash will be a big player during 2009, more so than it was this year. Perhaps Google will fully crawl Flash content, and developers, with help from Adobe, will make it so transparent that users can’t tell the difference except that it’s an enhanced experience. Perhaps it’ll become truly suitable for making entire websites in, and people like me will have to accept that. I believe so, though it won’t happen within a year.
Adobe AIR makes it easy for web designers and other creative people to build stand-alone web applications. The modern web designer may ask why we would we need stand-alone applications but it’s not a question of what we need but what is most suitable. AIR gives us a choice and makes it simple enough that we can focus on more important matters, such as finding new ways of complicating it. Once again this is a natural progress but perhaps a little more fun since it gives us a chance to creatively challenge ourselves.
As you can see, speculating about the coming year may be a fun game to play on New Years eve. However, tomorrow and the day after I suggest we do it without a time-frame in mind because only then can we see the big picture, or at least the part we can glimpse from our point of view. Most change takes place over time. Revolutionary change that occurs almost instantly is rare and while we may think we can predict it, to pinpoint it is a different matter.
If we in 2009 will hit the light switch of revolutionary change or not, time will tell. It will, however, be a year of revolution on a highly individual level. People will change, they always do, but I’ve got a special feeling about the coming year. My girlfriend will make a life-altering shift into recruitment. A few friends of mine will make radical changes to the directions of their lives and others that have already hit the spot will continue to make discoveries that will further define their destiny. 2009 will be a great year.
Before this post and the year of 2008 comes to an end, I’d like to give one of those thank you speeches. Thanks to my friends and coworkers for, despite a lack of experience and education, giving me more than I could ask for and introducing me to a truly different way of working. Your acceptance and friendliness is invaluable.
Thanks for the continued support and understanding of my family and friends back in my home country, it means a lot. Last but not least, thanks to my girlfriend for coping with me despite sometimes long working hours and me being an occasional pain in the ass.
I have a couple of alterations of attitude and lifestyle that will take place at 12.00 AM tonight and I urge you to consider them too. The first is to stop letting the negative opinions and attitudes of others affect me, which happens all too often. The second is to act and to do it now instead of holding off for the (infamous) right time. If you want it, go get it — now is the time.
Happy new year!
