Web development is on the move. Ace at CSS, semantic markup, Javascript or server side languages? Great. But it doesn't look like it's gonna help you all that much anymore in the long run. I'm not talking next year, mind you, but I'm pretty sure that in five years from now things are going to be looking a whole lot different than they do right now.

Our craft is becoming a commodity and people in charge don't care about the quality of the markup, CSS or how short our JavaScript is. What matters is how fast you can get it to market, how many people it reaches and how cheaply it can be built.

Christian Heilmann

There's a somewhat disturbing thing going on with people advocating a rebirth of table based web design. Why? Probably because CSS layouts are 'hard'. A similar movement is visible with Javascript. Hello Classic OO! Why? Probably because prototype based OO is 'hard'. Aral pointed out to me in a response on Twitter that a similar thing has happened already in Flash ActionScript. Apparently just about everything is 'too hard' and has to be made easy for the masses. Bottom line: The ability to do a CSS layout from scratch is going to be irrelevant. The ability to do all sorts of voodoo magic in javascript is going to be equally irrelevant. There's just not gonna be anyone who cares about these abilities, unless you want to become a library/SDK developer.

After releasing my first Tumblr Theme iBlack and seeing it becoming a 'rising star' I decided I wanted to do another one. This time I decided to go minimalist and do a theme with almost no graphics. This theme is mostly typography and shapes and I'm pretty excited about it. It's called 'Helvetica' and it's a homage to the most awesome font ever created. Unfortunately Windows users will have to do with the seriously inferior Arial but... that's what you get, I guess.

I submitted the theme to Tumblr but... if you want the enhanced version with Twitter and Disqus integrated, get the full blown version here!

P.S. did I tell you I LOVE Tumbr?