Long before the DaVinci Code
became a ubiquitous part of popular culture, I thought that DaVinci was a great symbol for the webdesigner, because Leonardo was both an engineer and an artist. The famous DaVinci drawing of Vitruvian Man was a study of "human factors," the essence of usability on the web. The web has opened up a whole new world for artists, illustrators, and graphic designers. By the late 1990's, every graphic designer on the planet had to learn HTML, or risk being out of work, even with years of experience. Now webdesign is presumed to be part of the definition of graphic design.
Now, every company has a website, and it is an ever more important part of business. We can barely remember before there was an internet. Silicon Valley, in fact, has re-invented itself for the internet. Cisco is now the mothership, as Lockheed was in the 20th century. And what would Cisco be without the internet? What if DARPAnet had not been released to the public/private sector? The 90's would not have been the 90's! Many forget that it was the chip industry which defined the "Silicon" Valley, not software or the internet. But now "engineering" means software engineering, and "computer" means the internet.
As soon as the internet appeared in the private sector
Software companies responded to the need for web tools, and web designers and developers have had to learn to use them. Because the web is such a visual place, software engineers, the left brainers, have had to move to the right, towards the visual designers' world, and the right-brainers have had to move to the left, to get involved in the functionality part of design. Industrial designers have done this in the past, but only since the web have graphic designers had to do the same. Now it seems that those most in demand are the people who are both right-brainers and left-brainers. No wonder Leonardo DaVinci is more popular than ever!