Learning Modern Web Design

How do you convince people you know what you’re talking about? I mean, if someone wants to double check that you have a clue about web design where can they go? I’m not talking about the little things – CSS hacks, binary things which are right or wrong based on something obvious – I’m mean the nearly imperceptible little bits that all come together to make the sum bigger than its parts. I’ll use Garrett Dimon’s concept of Front End Architecture as a good example of this.

If you’re an expert too, no problem. You visit your personal set of blogs, ask a few people over on the lists you inhabit, digg out articles you read ages ago and added to del.icio.us. You learn something new and get on with your work.

But what if you’re involved in management? Or are bringing your expertise from another field to web design (say marketing, or graphic design, all things you need)? Of course you need to trust the experts but it would still be useful to have at least a big picture idea about what is going on. It’s the same for specialists – someone working day in, day out with ASP.NET doesn’t need to know the in’s and outs of CSS in IE7, but having the big picture – from architecture to usability – is going to be useful.

I started gathering some of this information together as a resource for work. One thing I noticed was that it was pretty much impossible to find the sort of theory based resources I was looking for without knowing where they were already. Specific blog posts (just blog URLs are too big a moving target to be useful for something so focused), online magazines, podcasts and books; their is so much information around, and much of it out of date or not useful enough to begin with. An expert can filter this, often without even thinking about it, but what about a non expert?

I’m going to gather this information together somewhere in the hopefully not too distant future but in the meantime does anyone know of any similar resources already out there? Where would you send your marketing savvy boss to get a feel for Ajax? or your best developer to get the skinny on usability?