Name : Jacob Gube
Company : Six Revisions
Job Title : Founder and Chief Editor
Twitter : http://twitter.com/sixrevisions
What are your skills : PHP/ .NET/ Flash-ActionScript/ XHTML/ JavaScript/jQuery/MooTools & MySQL
How did you get into the web design world?:
I started designing websites as a hobby, when I was maybe about 15-16 years old. Professionally, I started out as a freelance graphic designer. But in the end, I found a lot more opportunities in web design and web development, and my interests and skills were more attuned to web-based designs rather than offline, print designs (that’s double-speak for “I’m a terrible logo designer”).
What is the first web site you opened?
The first site I owned was Six Revisions. Prior to that, I tried to launch a blog about electronic gadgets (sort of like Engaged), but it didn’t take off because I didn’t have passion for the subject–at least not as much as making websites.
What site do you waste most of your possibly productive time?
Twitter, Digg, and Delicious take up a lot of my productive time, but I justify this in that these sites keep me current about our industry, so it’s not completely wasted time. A real time-waster for me though is Kongregate, which is a Flash gaming site. I can spend an entire day playing web-based Flash games and never realize it because they’re so much fun!
What would make you leave the web design world?
I don’t think anything can prompt me to leave the industry because I really can’t imagine anything that I’d rather be doing professionally. I think the only reason I’d want to leave the industry is when I’m finally ready to retire.
If you could advise the best way to learn web design, what would it be?
The best way to learn is hands on. You can read books, read tutorials, go to classes, but at the end of the day, the best way is through experience. Much of what I know now, I learned on the job.
Industry Standard tools or Open Source?
Open source when you can, industry standard tools otherwise. I use Photoshop, for example, since I don’t feel comfortable using something like GIMP.
Do you have a funny story related to the web you want to share?
Many! One time I was messing around with the Six Revisions servers and I must’ve changed something by accident. So for a while, when you tried to go to the site, it was asking you to download the web pages instead of rendering them in your web browser! Everyone thought the site got compromised, but nope, it was just me not following best practices and tinkering in a live server instead of testing my changes on a sandbox.
What excites you about the web industry at the moment?
Real time web. With handsets being available to everyone and web services like Twitter, we’re at a place in time where we get news instantaneously. News that took days to circulate get blasted through Twitter in seconds. Search results are more time-contextual as well; if you wanted to research a restaurant you want to have dinner at, you’ll find tweets and reviews of it from people who were just there, instead of stale content from five years ago.
What aspect of the web do you wish would role over and die?
Since I work partially as a web accessibility specialist, I really would like people who still use tables for layouts to stop. If you have ever tried to “read” a site that was laid out in tables, you’d understand the importance of this. I know, it’s a tired argument, and I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but the common argument against tables is always about “because it’s not best practice” or because it’s not semantic to lay content blocks in table cells; the practical argument is web accessibility.
What advise can you give to our new students at Web Courses Bangkok hoping to tread in your footsteps?
Always keep learning. Try to learn something new every day. I’ve been a web designer/developer for 7 years or so, but I still learn something new every single day.
Thank you Jacob, and if you would like more information on Jacob Check out his blog and some of his fantastic past work
