Married Inc.

Here is my wishlist for what I wish programmers would understand about graphic design (I apoligise if this insulting to some but these observations are based on the fact that I have worked with a LOT of programmers over the year)

- I wish that programmers could see when a font is different from the rest. Even a simple this is a Serif and the rest of the site is not.

- I wish that programmers understood layout grids and wouldn’t look at me funny when their lines are totally broken

- I wish that every programmer learned just what is shown by Andrew Mundi’s great site “Principles of Graphic Design“.

Download the Flash Files please… for God’s Sake please download the Flash files and review them. MouseOver everything.

Bryce

I think this is a great idea for a session! I probably sit closer to the design side of the fence than the programming side so I’d be happy to sit in and lend a hand from that perspective.

I wonder if the latter portion (dissecting designs) isn’t a bit too ambitious though - having pulled apart a whole bunch of CSS layouts in my time, I can say with some authority that it can take a loooong time to really understand how an effect was achieved. A different approach that might lead to the same benefits (i.e.: useful, applicable design skills) is to find a few pairs of sites that have the same basic functionality but dramatically different designs and to take a look at how the design impacts the overall success of the site (Google vs. Yahoo! comes to mind). There are a lot of OpenSource projects out there with brilliant tech chops but really crappy design (from both visual and UI perspectives), so we might be able to think of a few pairings of OSS vs. Commercial stuff. Maybe an email to the Google Group to solicit examples?

Thanks John!

Bryce,

Great points! I was planning on going over font basics a bit, so that’s covered. I like the idea of looking at layout grids–that’s a good thing to talk about along with using whitespace. I’ll add it.

I don’t know what you are getting at regarding Flash files… but there should be lots of time at the end of the session to get everyone talking.

John

All I was saying about the flash files is that Andrew Mundi has put together a great little tutorial that could be used as a reference or maybe a footnote (for more info go here…)

It would be hilarious if you showed design errors as if they were compiling errors. The Font Debugger. The Color Syntax checker. The Grid Validator.

Bryce

Jay,

I may be bitting off a lot in offering to dissect ANY design on-the-fly, but I think it’ll work.

What I’d like to impart most is an approach to figuring this stuff out. I don’t want to present an academic breakdown of sites that I studied ahead of time.

Also, I don’t really want to get to heavy into HTML/CSS–I want to keep this more in the realm of Photoshop and Illustrator. We’ll just have to see how it goes though, depends what effects everyone is most interested in.

This is going to be fun. I’m glad you’ll be in the session to help out if some really tricky stuff comes up.

John

Bryce–Brilliant! Love the design errors = build errors metaphor!

I think it would be useful for programmers to simply understand what CSS can do, just so they don’t waste time using basic tools creating effects that are easy to do (and adjust) later in CSS.

[…] good start, more and more people are showing up all the time. Bryce had an interesting session on “The Foundation of Design Thinking and Strategic Development”. And John had a nicesession titled “Graphics Design for Programmers, it’s been so long since I did Linear math that he got my mind racing again on vector graphics. Technorati Tags: torcamp  # […]