On 1/19/17, 10:43 AM, "carlos.rov...@gmail.com on behalf of Carlos Rovira" <carlos.rov...@gmail.com on behalf of carlos.rov...@codeoscopic.com> wrote:
>Hi, > >we should get people motivated with skills in design and planing of UI / >UX >skins, visuals, effects and transitions. >Art is different from engineering and we could get people in very >different >places since we never know who could have the skills to hand crafting >something we'd like and have at the same time the rigurosity we need to be >able to implement. > >So, both professional/exp and students could have the potential and I'd >not >throw any opportunity to get people on board. > >My bet is that we should get the way to get more than one look and feel >and >from the development side be able to prepare FlexJS to have themes so we >could then prepare diferent workspaces for different designers and let >them >prepare the their art. As I said before, should be normal that one look >and >feel will be prepared for only one person. If we prepare some spec about >how should they prepare their art to be consumed by our framework, we >could >get in this way different themes packaged and ready to be loaded into >flexjs > >what do you think? Well, I can code, but I cannot draw, so in all my past experiences before Flex where I worked on end-user applications, there were a team of people who did usability, a different team that did graphic design, and yet another team that wrote the code. Sometimes you can find two or three of these skills in the same person, but I would not hold my breath waiting for someone like that. Also, it looks to me that there might be more than one way to "change the visuals". It seems like MDL said "we will give you a choice of several looks, but there's lots of things you can't change". Bootstrap seems to say "Here's some widgets, go muck with CSS to change the look if you want". Flex says "Draw it and we'll display it". IOW, MDL has some extra pre-defined CSS files so you don't have to know anything about CSS, Bootstrap requires knowing a lot about CSS, Flex doesn't require any CSS, just the right drawing tools. Given that Apache project are volunteer-driven and contributors do not get paid for contributing so probably helping out in their spare time, I am willing to take whatever someone can offer. We just had someone new (TrevorH) offer to help. The ultimate goal might be a full out spec like Material Design [1], but that looks like a ton of work. So, what is the minimum useful design contribution? I would say it is a screenshot, PDF, AI, PNG, or other file depicting a set of widgets. Bonus points if they have time to try to write the code to support it, but otherwise, some other volunteer will pitch in to do that. IF a second designer can find time to provide a different look, then the coding volunteers can better understand what the best way to provide a set of components that allows switching. It might be CSS-driven, or vector-graphics driven, or both. Who knows? I don't personally care, I'd just like to see some ideas. Beyond that, as we approach 1.0, we will need other things like graphic design and UX improvements on our examples, TourDeFlexJS, etc. And again, if we can find a way to allow small contributions to build up into something big, that will likely be the best approach to take. But since we might actually have a designer in the conversation, let me pose this question: TrevorH, how much time do you have, and what would be the most efficient way for us to use your skills? Do you prefer to work with Vector Graphics or CSS? My 2 cents, -Alex [1] https://material.io
