Web Designers who can't code
This great post from Elliot Jay Stockscovers a number of points that I deal with on a number of levels each week.
To start off: I am a web designer who codes. I'm someone who enjoys the process of writing good, semantic code - loves the cleanliness of it, loves the craft, the constant learning, the new techniques - all of it. It appeals to me. It doesn't appeal to everyone.
The design side of the process is different for me. It requires inspiration, it requires space to breathe and it requires patience. A good friend of mine who is a comedy writer for the BBC said to me once that while it appeared that he was doing nothing but loafing around his plush Docklands apartment, what he was actually doing was creating space in his brain for ideas to develop in the background. When I realised he was serious it completely changed my attitude to creativity. There's no point pushing it - give it space, let it develop, and the ideas will come. In short, for me - and for many others, I suspect - it's a completely different process from coding.
Coding, I get in early, put the coffee on, and crank through line after line. Designing, well, a good part of it is loafing around allowing the ideas to develop sub consciously.
So, anyway, this article from Elliot ... it expresses frustrations that some designers don't know enough about code - and then, how that impacts the development process. I agree - it's frustrating. But it needn't be. I work with a couple of extremely accomplished graphic designers - they design the site, I code it up. They don't know how to code, they don't want to learn, and we're all happy. But they have a craft - they have experience, they have a good attitude, they take advice when I say 'that won't work because of X' - they understand that I'm the expert in some areas. Because they know their craft inside and out, the sites are generally successful.
The flip side is that I occasionally work with other graphic designers who *really* need to either learn their craft better so that they can acknowledge their speciality OR they need to learn to code so that they can understand the limitations of their work.
Of course, working in teams is a crucial aspect of large projects - and everyone has their speciality, but as Elliot points out
a decent working knowledge of your team members' skills is a huge bonus: even if you’re not making nightmarish mistakes that fill your developers with dread, there may still be aspects of your non-code-aware design process that makes the lives of your teammates unnecessarily hard.
– Elliot Jay Stocks
And that's it, I guess - in a team - whether it's a 2 person team or a 10 person team, a decent knowledge of your team members' skills and processes will make your team stronger. So, get learning - there's no excuse.
Dirty Harry meets Rain Man
More comic genius from xkcd.com
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German Government tells people to stop using Internet Explorer
This caught my eye over the weekend ... The German Government has officially advised web users to find an alternative to using Internet Explorer for security reasons.
That's amazing - I've never known a government even attempt to get involved in something like this, but there we are.
Read the article on SitePoint.
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Speaking at North West Connects
Yowser.
About a month ago, over a Happy Meal™, tasty beverage and a drive back from Belfast, I agreed to speak at the conference North West Connects. And it's on Saturday.
So, if you're in Sligo on Saturday and you fancy a bunch of interesting speakers (well, and me), some good networking opportunities, and some hot coffee - , come along!
TickTockDesign.com in 'worth something' shocker
Even though the graph suggests I've had no visitors to this site since June of this year, BizInformation.org.us reckons my domain name is worth over $38,000
You can get in touch if you like - serious offers only!
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Dark sky awards
Oh - I like this ... here in Fermanagh we sometimes have fabulously dark skies, and star gazing is a wonderful thing to do with my 6 year old son - he loves it. Winter time especially - when it's very dark before his bed time - is ripe for it.
So, I was delighted to read that there are such a thing as 'Dark Sky Parks and Galloway in Scotland has been designated as the first official Dark Sky Park in Great Britain. Good stuff - although they should come to Fermanagh some time, I'm sure our Dark Sky rating would be almost as high!
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CNN redesign goes up to 11 ...
Tooling around with some background images used in the new CNN redesign - which is lovely - I noticed that they've upped their basic screen width to 990px.
This is reasonably significant ... their user base is broad and the range of screen resolutions that they would have to cater for, you would think, would be equally broad.
What they're saying here is that smaller resolutions now make up an insignificant enough percentage of their readership to justify the new width (it's a fixed width site). So, we're slowly edging up ... I know that woot redesigned to 1024 earlier in the year, but I think that with CNN we're really seeing the main streaming of wider sites.
Interested to see how the new site looks on the iPhone.
Recent Reading
Have been out and about these past few weeks and am catching up on some reading / viewing over the weekend ... here's what I'll be diving into:
This is a topic that I'm getting more and more interested in, and having founc the fabulous website of Brain Traffic the other day, I was clicking around the subject a little more. It was also a point that Wilson Miner made at the recent Build Conference in Belfast. "When hiring a designer - hire the one who can write" - is an old saw, but none the less valid for that.
Another interesting recent topic. A couple of weeks ago I attended a one day training given by Paul Boag - a mood board evangelist, if you like - and for the first time took the prospect of mood boards seriously. And now, in one of those serendipitous moments, the good people at Forty Agency have put together this little video.
Which reminds me, Viget also produced a couple of recent articles on them too:
Lastly, this wonderfully typeset web-book 'Dive into HTML5'. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what it is - but it looks wonderful and what I've read so far seems an extremely useful primer (and more) on HTML5. There's a printed book you can pre-order too.
The typography really is exquisite - and made the more noteworthy because I believe they're using the recently used Type Kit to serve up accessible local fonts.
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Michael Beirut's Design Secrets ...
Michael Beirut is about as close as it gets in Graphic Design to being a 'thought leader' / 'guru' (delete as appropriate).
Over many, many years in design he has kept 86 notebooks ... in the video below he picks out 5 case studies from these books and follows them from conception to completion.
It's about as unmissable as these things get:
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