Web Personality Types

Molly Holzschlag has a wonderfully humorous breakdown of the different personality types exhibited by people who design and develop on the web. I fit squarely into the SAVD category.

SAVD. Standards Aware Visual Designer. These people are designing with standards in mind—creating beautiful sites for the screen, working toward achieving accessible sites, examining usability and human factors, and very possibly beginning or already designing for alternative devices and media types. A very rare breed, and if you are reading this post it’s very highly likely you’re either one your own fine self, know all their names or have Zeldman’s personal phone number memorized.

I’m going to hazard a guess and say that my blogmate Faust is a SASS. What do you think Faust? Is this accurate? You seem to be much more concerned about semantic markup than I am, right?

SASS. Standards Aware Structural Semanticist. These personalities are very code-centric, with little interest (or more often, skill) in presentation but lots of interest in the proper structuring of documents, use of meaningful markup, microformats, Semantic Web and the like. At their most compulsive, they can become purists to the point of having unrealistic expectations of the more worldly Web worker. Also a rare breed, SASS personalities are extremely important to the good of the Web but sometimes need to be reminded that smart structure and semantics can happily co-exist with visual design.

Thanks, Molly, for the laugh. I would add one category that I’ve encountered: OSCC or Old Skool Creative Communicator. This is a person who believes first and foremost in communication. The most important point of a website is to communicate, and anything that gets in the way is discarded. This person can’t be bothered to update their skills or learn new web methodologies because, in their view, XHTML, CSS and semantic markup are technical details that detract from the primary purpose of the web. Umm…which is to communicate.