Learning Web Design, 6th Edition

Foreword

by Brad Frost

It was a warm September night somewhere outside of Nashville. The campfire crackled, and because I can’t help myself, I plucked away at my acoustic guitar. Based on the laughter emanating from our circle and into the woods, you wouldn’t know that the people sitting around the fire had just met each other a few days earlier. Conversation about life, design, music, and technology blurred together, and inside jokes were formed in real time…but even the best of nights has to end, and we knew we had important work to do in the morning.

As we trudged back from the fire back to our Airbnb, I asked Jen—whom I’d been laughing along with all night—the boring question most people lead with when they meet someone: “So what do you do for work?”

Jen casually replied, “Oh, I’ve written a couple of books about web design.”

“Oh, nice! What are they?”

“Learning Web Design, Web Design in a Nutshell, and a couple others.”

I stopped dead in my tracks.

My eyebrows shot up as my neurons connected the dots: the warm and hilarious person I’d been hanging out with also happened to be the author of the very first book I’d ever read about web design. That book, Web Design in a Nutshell, ignited in me a passion for the web and set me on a trajectory in life that somehow led to me to being invited to a post-conference retreat with many of my web design heroes. That retreat then triggered a snowball of events for me that has led to a long career full of success, notoriety, friendships, ...