On Mar 10, 2009, at 7:12 PM, mark schraad wrote:
In my life I have met handful of people who could be a candidate for
such a role. As a hiring manager or owner I could spend all of my
time looking - and frankly, there many other tasks worthy of this
time. To put this sort requirement out there as a standard would be
irresponsible.
Irresponsible?
Hardly. And for what its worth, the hard skills I list are being
acquired daily by the new crop of digital designers emerging who have
a much different context of what they grew up with with regard to
technology. Knowing how to use Photoshop, Illustrator/Fireworks,
Microsoft Word, InDesign, Visio, and all of the rest are variations on
a theme, so complaining about how to learn software when your job is
to design software seems to me a contradiction.
After that, learning how to script HTML, CSS and JavaScript is the
most basic form of scripting that anyone who spends a little time
doing can pick up well within a year's timeframe, and yields a massive
amount of control in how well you can build and design your software.
Irresponsible?
The skills I laid out are a fraction of what lawyers, doctors and
architects are expected to learn and know. A fraction. Industrial
designers are expected to know more than the skills I laid out.
Further, there are people in Silicon Valley who get paid $120K a year
to draw Visio wireframe diagrams all day long. $120K... to draw Visio
diagrams.
Irresponsible?
Are you kidding me?
Seriously... I have no idea why some of you say or think these things.
The skills I laid out are not impossible nor excessive. Further, they
are precisely the skills that make one a designer who can controls the
fate of the work they design, as opposed to someone who simply tells
people what to build and hopes at the end of the day "they" get it
right.
Learning those skills, mastering those skills, it's also why the job
is *fun*. You get to *make* things with the skills I laid out. Why
wouldn't you *want* to pick them up?
--
Andrei Herasimchuk
Chief Design Officer, Involution Studios
innovating the digital world
e. [email protected]
c. +1 408 306 6422
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