Wolf’s Little Store

“If we must never take any chances, we should have nothing at all, for nothing is certain” - Blaise Pascal

Today, exactly one year ago, I started working in web design. I don’t have a degree. I never had any formal education in web design, graphic design or coding. But, somehow, it all came together.

After I finished secondary school late June 2006, I had no clue what to do with my life. Most of my friends had some sort of plan - one wanted to become a doctor, another went to study physics and another was fairly sure he wanted to work in stock exchange like his father, so he went on to study economics. Then I had a friend who went ice skating all over the world, but even though he’s a pro athlete, he eventually pursued a study in journalism.

So my mates clearly had a plan. I figured I would get one too - after all, I had three months of absolutely nothing in front of me. There would be this moment of clarity when it would dawn on me what I should do with my life.

High school generally was a breeze, with a few hickups here and there (O, how I hated you, biology class!). I got through it with a long stroke of luck, mostly by paying that exact amount of attention during classes you need to pass the year. Minimal effort, maximum result - a strategy that worked well for me, and most of my friends. When I stepped out of that school gate for the last time I was a happy young man.

When I was fifteen or sixteen years old I shared Punk-O-Rama CD’s with my friends, played video games, went to our first parties, met girls, drank beer, went out. I reviewed video games and music CDs for a couple of small Belgian websites and every once in a while I’d help someone out with a design for a party flyer or a website. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing but it didn’t matter. As I would learn later on, most people are happy enough to call drop shadows and gradients design.

During my school years a frame of mind slowly constructed itself inside my head. It consisted of a few key points. The main one is that I would never ever again do anything I hated [or was principally against] after finishing secondary school (did I mention I hated school with a deep passion?).

The other key point was to do things differently. I didn’t want to work from 9 to 5. I didn’t want to get a wife, kids, a house, a dog and a funeral. There had to be more to life than working your ass off from nine to five in an office somewhere.

During my summer break I managed to get fired from 2 out of 3 student jobs. I left the first one because it was ridiculously boring. It consisted of getting a list of items, getting the items, dropping off the items at a specified location, rinse, repeat. It was like doing fed-ex type quests in an MMORPG, except without any character progression.

I got fired from the second one because I called in sick one day. I wasn’t really ill. This job was as boring as the last one. This one consisted of relocating potted plants from one hangar to another one. On the phone, the manager told me: “If we can’t count on you, you’re out.”. He was totally right. I got blacklisted at the local temp job office until I sent in my formal apologies.

The third one had an evil ring to it. I was working at a candy factory. I got fired because apparently I didn’t package the candy fast enough. I’m sure the almost bald, fifty year old woman who worked with me beat me at speed, but then again, she had been packaging candy bars for the past thirty years. Trying to prevent boredom by playing music wasn’t exactly appreciated by my other co-workers. Who were bald aging women too.

This place was drowning in a sadness I can barely bring to words. After two days of packaging candy, the ‘director’s board’ [evil laughter] called in and told me I didn’t have to come again the next day.

These three jobs confirmed my thoughts of what working life would be like and at that point, I really wanted to find a course that fit me, as not to jump into working life without a degree. What motivated me was being the guy who threw away the trash, as opposed to being the guy who picks up everyone’s trash. No offense to the garbage men, but you get what I’m trying to say, right?

September came and I still had no idea what I wanted to do. While the period between graduating high school and entering university is about the longest stretch of free time you’ll have before retiring [with a few exceptions of course], it’s not as stress-free as you’d like it to be. When you graduate from secondary school, there’s this general pressure on you to choose what you want to be in life. Chances that you have a clue what you want to be when you’re eighteen are close to zero.

Having to choose a course weighed me down. Scrolling through the list of available courses, I would find something that would interest me - but reading the course descriptions and subjects taught I felt it was going to be exactly like secondary school, with the only highlight being able to choose whether to attend lessons or not, in high contrast to everything-we-ever-think-of-is-mandatory secondary school.

Turning point

Then I took one of the best decisions I ever made. I took the money from my savings account and deposited it to my regular bank account. I signed up for a credit card and ordered 375 dollars in cold, hard cash from the bank.

September fifteenth I boarded a British Airways flight from Brussels, Belgium to New York, USA. I gave myself two months on my own to find an answer to the question that was driving me crazy: what to do with my life?

I was on a limited budget and there was no way I could pay two months of hotels or even two months of youth hostel and food on my own. I couldn’t get a job because you need a green card to work in the US. I’m firmly against any illegal work so just trying to get around was out of the question.

Internet to the rescue!

There’s this community of travelers called Couchsurfing.com. Couchsurfing is easily explained, but hard to ‘get’. Basically you open up your house to strangers across the world. You sign up, create a profile, tell people a bit about yourself. People with similar interests can find you through the search engine or friends of friends. Then you make a request to stay with someone. Usually they don’t have an extra bed or room for you, but that’s fine, since couchsurfing is free of charge. You can sleep on the couch, that’s the point.

I tried to repay their hospitality by going to the supermarket for my hosts, taking them out for dinner or just trying to be good company in general (when my VISA limits ran out). Even if you’re a totally random, if you write someone a nice introduction and chat a bit with them, you have a good chance of being able to stay for a couple of days.

I hate touristy stuff, so I did my very best to not be a tourist. I was in the US to find an answer to my question, but also to experience the US. And I believe the only way to experience a country is to live there. Couchsurfing was ideal because living in someone else’s home is the closest you’ll get to actually living somewhere.

Hallelujah

If there’s anything that makes my day, it’s a new situation. Something I haven’t seen before. My U.S. trip had a lot of those new situations. I’m not going to tell you the whole U.S. story because that would lead us to far astray. One key point however.

I was sitting on the New York subway, the red line from Amsterdam Avenue to Grand Central, just looking around, when an advertisement in the daily free newspaper caught my eye. It was an uninspired advert for an insurance company, but what struck me was the quote they used as a headline.

“If we must never take any chances, we should have nothing at all, for nothing is certain” - Blaise Pascal

I jotted this down in my notebook. I was intrigued by this quote because it kind of summed up why I was doing this. Why I packed my bags and went to the U.S. for two months, while I “should” have been pursuing my master’s degree in whatever. If you’re not going to take any chances, ever, you don’t deserve a thing. You might as well not be there.

After one a half month in the U.S., after meeting a lot of people, reading everything I could get my hands on (and that was somewhat interesting), a lot of strolling through New York, Boston and even Key West, Florida I stumbled upon a book.

It was called “Web design with Web standards” and was written by Jeffrey Zeldman. I read the first chapters in Border’s bookstore in Boston and went home with the comfortable thought that I had found what I was looking for.

I had tried to build a website before, which was generally a frustrating experience, you know, with tables and Frontpage and the WYSIWYG hell that is Dreamweavers’ design view. But this was different.

The two girls that were hosting me at the time had an OK computer [with Photoshop] and I had lots of time on my hands. I didn’t buy Webdesign with Web Standards (2) but running a Google search to web standards led me to A List Apart, Simplebits, HTMLdog and the like. During my last two weeks in the U.S. I built a small site for myself, which I regularly publish to now (Wolf’s Little Store).

And that kicked off my career in webdesign

Back in Belgium, I frantically started to research everything webdesign. I found what I wanted to do and now was the time to do it. December consisted of re-learning HTML the proper way. Then came the magic of CSS.

I figured I needed to get a job if I wanted to improve my skills. And make some money of course. I was flat broke from my U.S. trip. December came and besides improving my skills (I was a beginner to say the least) I started looking at web design firms in Belgium. A popular Belgian forum has a list up with all the ‘respectable’ web agencies in Belgium.

I didn’t like what I saw. Most of them portfolio websites matched three or four of these criteria: dull, badly written copy, poor design, or inaccessible, or fully in Flash. However, out of the hundred or so companies in the list, a few stood out.

One of them had a job opening. It was a month old but I figured I could take my chances and send them an e-mail. Nothing happened for a week, but somewhere in mid january, Bart of Netlash send me an e-mail back whether I wanted to come talk to him and Dirk to apply for a temporary job of one month at Netlash. They needed a web designer in between a laid off designer and a new one, who was only able to work from March on. The application mainly consisted of some sort of SimpleQuiz and I got hired.

So I was filling a gap, and I was happy with it. I got an old Mac to work on (3) and met the people who are my colleagues today. It was great. The first few weeks I learned so much. I could barely slice ‘n dice and slowly but surely I learned how to deal with all those nasty browser bugs.

Dirk, Netlash’s lead designer at the time, while sometimes a bit the angry type of guy, taught me a great deal about design and typography, which only led me to read more and more about the why’s and how’s of (web)design.

I’m not going to namedrop all my colleagues, you know who you are. Respect.

After my temporary contract, I was offered a full contract and gladly accepted it. Today, exactly one year ago I started working in webdesign. And it’s been great. Turned out I was wrong on a nine to five job being hell.

Thank you.

• ⁽¹⁾ continued education and generally easier/more practical than university
• ⁽²⁾ eventually I bought myself the Dutch version for Christmas, along with Transcending CSS
• ⁽³⁾ Exposing me to the wonderful world of OSX and all it’s great applications
• E-mail me at my name at my company’s name dot com
• (10-06-08; fixed some typo’s and rewrote some sentences for clarity)

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