Who is Renaissance Design?
I’m Chris, a web designer/developer living in not-so-sunny South Wales. I’ve been working and playing with Web technologies for the past ten years, love good typography and am a long-term advocate of web standards.
I believe that effective websites are designed for their users not their stakeholders. I believe that if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing well, and that taking the time to create excellence will pay off tenfold over just getting the job done.
Of course, I don’t spend all my time thinking about the Web, which is why you’ll find I also blog about anything that crosses my mind.
So why “Renaissance” Design?
In the European Renaissance, it was the ideal of every educated man to excel in as many disciplines as possible. An oft-quoted example is Leonardo da Vinci; painter, sculptor, anatomist, geologist, engineer, architect, inventor and humanist.
A more modern take on the subject, which fairly accurately sums up my philosophy on accomplishment and life in general comes from philosopher and novelist Robert Anson Heinlein:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Who I’m Not
I’m not the Vice President of Product at Facebook, neither am I a Republican Congressman. You haven’t heard me as George W Bush in Family Guy. I’m not a Photoshop product engineer at Adobe, and although I can’t read minds, I’m not this Chris Cox either.
