Living up to the legacy of 'cool' web designers

Wired on Friday: Do you remember that brief moment in the 1990s when it was cool to be a web designer? Political and economic gurus like Britain's Charles Leadbeater and Kate Oakley lauded these "Independents", freelancing creative ambassadors who were said to be some of the coolest inhabitants of the brave new media world.

To be frank, I wasn't even sure that "web designers" still existed. These days most of the web designers I know are jacks of all trades - doing the layout of web pages as part of a whole medley of other skills, or alternatively, trying to shift gently onto other job paths. Listening to the speakers at the Decade of Web Design Conference in Amsterdam last week seemed to not only confirm that, but presented a strong argument that it's always been like that.

Much of the bent of the conference's discussion was purely historical, describing those halcyon days of 1994 onwards as though they were 100 years ago, not 10, and web designers were like railway tycoons, or buggy-whip manufacturers.

Excellent deconstructions of the dotcom boom were conducted by learned academics, combined with rather sober economic analyses of its effect on the present day.

Urban sociology professor Mr Michael Indergaard analysed the effect on real estate prices in New York after the boom.

The pricing shenanigans engaged in by property owners on the web design industry helped, he thought, skim much of the venture capital investors' cash into the "old money" pockets they so openly despised.

By far the most fascinating talk was by Ms Rosalind Gill, of the London School of Economics, who summarised a survey she conducted among new media figures at the height of the boom.

Her interviewees, back in 2000, saw themselves as highly independent, high-flying entrepreneurs - even though their average earnings from the web were less than €16,000, and most were supplementing their income with other jobs such as teaching.

They identified themselves as web designers. "In the same way," she said, cheerily, "people who spend most of the year working as waiters self-identify as actors."

It was odd, and strangely reassuring, to realise that even at the point five years ago when it looked like everyone who even touched the internet was getting rich, most were struggling to get by.

That's certainly how I remember it. And odd to think that much of the boom in web design was because, if briefly, that was what people wanted to be known as, not what they spent their time doing.

Ms Gill's research is now several years old, but her department at the LSE is about to embark on a fresh set of interviews.

It will be interesting to see quite how historical those jobs have become.

But some things may not have changed. Those "self-identifying" web designers still exist, and filled the conference. I spoke at the conference, which gives you a fine placing from which to stare closely at your audience.

It seemed to me that the attendees could be divided into two groups: those who had passed through the 1990s, and had become quite cynical, and those, of a rather younger average age, who were still very keen to learn about everything to do with the web, even if it was couched in great pessimism.

One of the former crowd openly despaired of her cheery students, saying that they all had deluded ideas of becoming rich and famous via the internet, and asked how could she bring them down to earth before they became bitter and disillusioned.

This didn't seem to be quite the right tack to take, especially when you are a teacher in the rare position of educating enthusiastic students.

I don't see web design as a career, but then I don't think it ever was.

As Ms Gill noted, her entrepreneurial subjects were mostly involved in web design to avoid a career - or because they had been unable to find such security in the modern job market. They treasured the opportunity to hop between disciplines.

Many of them, post-boom, have already hopped off to other areas - advertising, print, even in one case I know, landscape gardening.

What Ms Gill spoke convincingly on was the stress that not having a traditional career caused; how much of the young subjects were in denial about how little they had earned, and their future prospects. I think that's true, and needs to be said.

But there's also a backlog of experience among these "Old Independents" about how to live that career-less, careering life.

As the years move on, more of the employed seem to be falling into that world, underpaid, and with an uncertain future, but with some freedoms not afforded to those who work a nine-to-five life.

It may no longer be cool to be a web designer but we can probably learn a lot from how they lived.