A while back, Randy, of ümlatte, posted some thoughts on becoming a full-stack developer, something that I take pride in being. Though I think it may be impractical in many (mostly larger) situations, developing a Web application (or anything) from end-to-end can be remarkably fulfilling, not to mention extremely efficient (assuming you’re good at each part of the stack). I think that as Web development has become more of a “real” profession, we see less and less people doing it all.
Anyway, that’s another post. Randy’s a fantastic developer, and he’s hoping to become a fantastic designer as well. In his blog entry, he says:
If anybody has any suggestions about how I can go about achieving my new goal, please feel free to speak up! I have a feeling this is going to be quite a bit more difficult than web development since design is so subjective.
That got me thinking—can you learn design? I’m not sure. In fact, I have two completely conflicting views: one practical (a) and one philosophical (b):
I’d guess that my first HTML project was maybe 95% other people’s code, 5% mine. Similarly, my next project was probably 90%, the third 80%, the fourth 70% and so on. Now it’s rare that I copy other people’s code, but that pattern holds true for every new language I learn, and I’m guessing that’s true for most Web developers. So why not for design? In design we call it inspiration, but is it really that different? The first two pages of my delicious bookmarks include an overwhelming number of design galleries, trends and tutorials. Often when I start a design project, I’ll find myself browsing through some of my favorite galleries and design magazines looking for inspiration. When I was first learning Photoshop, my designs were probably 95% tutorial, 5% my design. Now it’s rare that I actually follow the tutorial instructions, but I still look at them for inspiration.
So, my practical advise would be: do the same thing you did learning HTML, learning CSS, learning Javascript, learning Ruby, learning PHP, etc, etc. Copy. Over time you may find that you need to copy less and less.
But there’s more to it than that. I don’t know what it is, but I know it exists. There’s something that makes Jonathan Ive special; something a Web designer like Joshua Davis or a graphic designer like Fabio Sasso has that not everyone has. We’ve all got a little bit of it, but while some folks have a tablespoon or maybe even a cup, others have a bucket.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try. It doesn’t necessarily just bubble out of you like you might imagine it did for DaVinci. Sometimes you don’t have the technical knowledge. Sometimes you just haven’t given it a chance. But I don’t think anyone can just pick up a Wacom tablet and design a site like Dave Shea or Dan Cederholm any more than they can pick up a paint brush and paint like Thomas Eakins.
So what do I actually think? I don’t know. I think there are a lot of things you can learn, from color theory, to proper use of white space, to typography, to concepts like the Golden Ratio. And I certainly know that I was a better graphic designer after taking some design classes in college than I was before. But I think a lot of that comes from doing it, and either getting it or not. Randy’s a pretty talented guy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets it, but I’m not sure if he’ll learn it or just finally discover it was already there to begin with.
Arstechnica just posted their unboxing of the new 24″ Apple Cinema display, and one paragraph of the review really reminded me why I decided about 1½ years ago to switch to the Mac platform:
The real nicety of the display is that Mac OS X knows when you have attached the display to use its integrated devices. That is, when you’ve hooked it all up, it will use the iSight in the display instead of the notebook’s, and it will use the USB audio on the display and disable the output on the notebook. That is, until you plug a set of headphones into the port on the notebook, at which time the display’s speakers will disable and route the audio directly to your ears automatically.
Good design is invisible. If you notice a design decision, it’s most likely because it got in your way. Now, I’m not saying I don’t have frustrating moments with my Mac, but it “just works” a lot more often than any other piece of technology I’ve owned, and serves as a constant reminder of what I should strive for in my design.
Update: it was bugging me, so I went ahead and wrote the greasemonkey script. It highlights replies in yellow, and the last message you read in green. Here’s the Userscripts.org page.
I just recently started using Twitter, and so far I like it a lot more than I ever thought I would. This is a problem, though, because I now use it enough to be very frustrated with its faults. Obviously their scaling problems are an issue that many, many people have talked about, and there are a number of core changes that might make the service better (location-based tweets, additional tweet “types,” etc). But I’m not talking about anything so grandiose—these are just two simple changes to the UI that would make me very happy.
Every time I refresh my twitter home page, I have to scroll down and find where I left off. Wouldn’t it be nice if twitter remembered that for you and added a nice little separator in your timeline? It’s a very simple interface tweak, but could save you a few seconds each time you check twitter.
Often, even after I’ve found the last tweet I’ve seen, I don’t have time to read through everything posted since then, so I skim. Normally I’m looking for conversations that I’m either watching or a part of, or I’m looking for replies to my tweets. Now conversations/threading is an issue that goes into the “bigger problem” category (an issue that Plurk has solved nicely, by the way), but showing replies should be easy as pie. If a tweet has @inxilpro in it, just highlight it or use some icon to differentiate it.
I realize that both of these UI changes could be solved with a little Greasemonkey script. In fact, I plan on writing such a script when I have a spare moment (hah!). I also realize that both these problems are solved by a number of Twitter clients out there, so maybe I’ll give Twitterific another chance.
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