On Mar 18, 2009, at 2:52 PM, Jackson Fox wrote:
The counter-trend is that a lot of front-end development is getting harder, not easier. Front-end web development is increasingly embracing advanced programming patterns, making it harder for designers to contribute meaningfully. Our tools are trying to catch up, but soon designers are going to have to start reading about OO patterns instead of design patterns.
Front-end development is not getting harder. It's actually getting easier, especially for designers to contribute meaningfully. I remember teaching myself enough coding back in the early 90s on the Mac to draw windows, menus and dialogs on my Mac SE/30. That was a pain in the ass compared to the stuff I did with Hypercard then.
These days, doing HTML+CSS+JS or MXML+FlashCSS+AS is an order of magnitude easier. And *what* you can do with the technologies these days with the larger screen sizes, far more robust animation and compositing engines, richer APIs, etc., is far more advanced. Toss in things like Dave mentioned, Blend or Catalyst and there really is no excuse now for a designer to not learn enough scripting to get a prototype -- or appearance model, using Dave's new religion of ID terminology -- built.
It's only hard if you haven't been keeping up with the trends which are quickly reaching a critical mass of standards and flattening technology. The good news is this: Learning HTML and the DOM, learning CSS, and learning JS or AS is not rocket science. In fact, if you know professional creative software inside and out (Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Framemaker, CorelDraw, Quark XPress, etc.) then you are more than a third of the way there as the concepts in traditional creative software permeates the technologies I listed. That can lead to other things like Ruby, Pearl, PHP, etc.
Not actively learning those things and claiming that you design interfaces will soon be like claiming to be a furniture designer but having no idea how a lathe works or how various types of wood handle stress and weight.
If you follow the parallels with high-tech products and the history of automobiles, you'll start to see that the high-tech is quickly coming upon what was known in the auto industry as "the golden age of design." The golden age of design was made possible once technology reached a critical mass while also standardizing enough to allow designers more freedom to spread their wings with the overall design of the car, which became increasingly more important in how car manufacturers differentiated themselves in the market. When that age hits the tech industry, those that don't know the skills or craft with their own two hands will quickly be weeded out. There's still time to catch up however.
To close, I got a demo of Shaun Inman's new Fever feed reader while at SXSW. (http://feedafever.com/) Simply put, it's amazing. Shaun designed and coded the whole thing himself, and he did it in a year's worth of time rebuilding the entire product three times over. The Shaun Inman's of the world are the future in this field with regard to skills, craft and aesthetic.
-- Andrei Herasimchuk Chief Design Officer, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [email protected] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
