What you get when you learn how to code
And why you should
You’ll never guess how I got started. Nineties kids—do you remember these?
AOL profiles? I owe both my design career and coding skills to these. It used to be all the rage to deck these out with ASCII art.
And if you knew a little bit of code, you could turn them into chromatic masterpieces. I had all of my favorite hex codes memorized (#FFDDEE is pastel pink). Hours were sunk into beautifying my profile.
Thankfully, those hours didn’t go to waste. From AOL profiles, I moved easily into HTML and CSS. It was a small leap to make back then from < body . bgcolor=#000000 > to <body bgcolor=“#000000”>. Unfortunately or fortunately, it’s no longer as simple now. The internet is very different (for example, I would be eviscerated if I were to use ‘bgcolor’) and there is much, much more to learn than when I first started. But one thing that I’m sure remains the same: it is still just as thrilling as it has always been to write that first line…
