On Graphic Design and Programming
Posted by Ben Jackson Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:44:00 GMT
Roger Johansson has a good take on some of the ideas behind my recent post on Object-Oriented Programming. He complains about the two extremes that he feels are out of his reach as a web professional trying to educate those at the fringes of the design/development camps:
Reaching is indeed a problem. I’ve spent countless hours writing tutorials and articles that are meant to help. But I find it hard to reach everybody, and there are two groups that stand out to me as being harder than others to reach.
Those who don’t want web design and development to follow any rules at all. They want the web to be a purely visual medium, and treat it as if it was a printed brochure or a computer game.
At the other end of the scale there are back-end programmers who don’t really want anything to do with client side programming, and let their development tools create the HTML, CSS and JavaScript for them. I would very much like to be able to reach these groups of people. But I’m not sure it’s possible to reach those that do not want to be reached.
The problem IMHO is that an overwhelming majority of the educational materials out there on web development, as well as many on design, are focused on following a series of steps to achieve a desired result. Most of the designers I know could follow a tutorial to make an accessible drop-down menu, but none of them would ever attempt to produce an entire website's markup and CSS. Likewise, most of the back-end programmers I know have never had any kind of visual training, and can care less if they're using Flickr or Fotolog.
Think about it. What if your designers could all write Javascript macros for all their Adobe Creative Suite applications? What if your coders all developed a good eye for typographic detail and grid system design? I could save hours of work readjusting values in a style-sheet that was already written by someone else without regard to the layout.
I can hear the tomatoes flying already. "Applescript's been around for over a decade and designers still don't use it." "Why should a programmer slow down what they're doing to make adjustments that I can pay a designer to do for half the salary?"
I'm not the only one who thinks that Applescript was a bad solution to this problem. Most people in my experience learn best with Javascript or C++, depending on what you want them to learn. There are already great tools out there to make web development education easier for designers (Xyle-scope is a godsend for anyone wishing to learn about XHTML and CSS).
As for your theoretically "faster" programmer, rest assured that the corners he's cutting on design may not be adding to his overall productivity. Plus you're paying two people to produce something that one can do in less time with experience and practice. I recently started design and typography lessons with our junior programmer, and after a hesitant start he's totally digging it.
