Ironically, your 3-column blog design is not very friendly, IMO. I had to scroll up and down to read that post.
Ironically?
Why Tony Stark is better than you
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#12I wish I was better at design. On the other hand there's this wonderful principle called division of labor, and while I might spend 10 hours designing a mediocre website, a good designer will design a great one in half the time. This has actually happened to me. After spending a weekend building out some pages that I thought looked pretty good, my designer friend sent me a photoshop mockup that made me decide to tota…
The fact that you toiled at that design for a weekend is part of why your designer friend could turn something around so quickly.
When your designer knows the basics of how programming works, and when your programmer has a grasp of the tenets of design, neither person has to operate as if the other is some sort of stupid magician. It's so refreshing.
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#13Stop believing Photoshop, Pixelmator, Illustrator, or anything else is too hard. These tools can have a steep learning curve (not as bad as you’d think), but so did programming when you were starting on this game.
Knowing how the tools and palettes work in Photoshop makes you a good designer like knowing Java's syntax makes you a good programmer.
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#14I wish I was better at design. On the other hand there's this wonderful principle called division of labor, and while I might spend 10 hours designing a mediocre website, a good designer will design a great one in half the time. This has actually happened to me. After spending a weekend building out some pages that I thought looked pretty good, my designer friend sent me a photoshop mockup that made me decide to tota…
Exactly....if one followed the OP's advice, I suppose maybe eventually I could get skilled in design and layout, but as far as I can tell, that is an entire profession in itself, I have enough trouble trying to stay current just on the pure programming stuff. The hours I've spent trying to get something to lay out properly across browsers using CSS could surely have been spent better elsewhere.
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#15Answer: Namely, because he is a fictitious character.
The article writers contention that programmers should also have solid HCI knowledge is not necessarily unreasonable, but the comparison to "2 meetings a week, and in a year..." is just ridiculous. Perhaps it was intended to be over the top, but division of labor exists for a good reason. What we really need are amazing back-end and interface engineers who can work with eachother effectively. That, and, as we are seeing with the iPhone becoming mainstream, a cultural willingness to put in extra work on the UI because it matters.
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#16I wish I was better at design. On the other hand there's this wonderful principle called division of labor, and while I might spend 10 hours designing a mediocre website, a good designer will design a great one in half the time. This has actually happened to me. After spending a weekend building out some pages that I thought looked pretty good, my designer friend sent me a photoshop mockup that made me decide to tota…
Exactly....if one followed the OP's advice, I suppose maybe eventually I could get skilled in design and layout, but as far as I can tell, that is an entire profession in itself, I have enough trouble trying to stay current just on the pure programming stuff. The hours I've spent trying to get something to lay out properly across browsers using CSS could surely have been spent better elsewhere.
I don't personally know many people who understand all of the intricacies of CSS and browser support and writing HTML along with it that aren't programmers.
To me, the design and the implementation are two very different things, and advanced CSS seems to be more in the programming realm (despite its goals to be accessible to the average designer).
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#17Yeah but Superman's better than Tony Stark and he can't design anything, so this argument is entirely invalidated.
Dude. You're NOT seriously going to TRY start a DC vs. Marvel comic character thrown-down on HN?!
I pity 'da fool.
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#18Stop believing Photoshop, Pixelmator, Illustrator, or anything else is too hard. These tools can have a steep learning curve (not as bad as you’d think), but so did programming when you were starting on this game. Knowing how the tools and palettes work in Photoshop makes you a good designer like knowing Java's syntax makes you a good programmer.
Ask someone who doesn't know how to program to read just a few lines of code. Though it's very naturally readable to you -- and in general, if you didn't know a new language you could try reading it line-by-line like English -- it looks totally impenetrable to them. I've heard people tell me that they have no idea how I do anything [programming] when they look at just a simple script in PHP or Ruby.
Knowing the Photoshop interface is clearly not what makes you a good designer, but in general it is a necessary-but-not-sufficient prerequisite to being really good.
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#19Ironically, your 3-column blog design is not very friendly, IMO. I had to scroll up and down to read that post.
I honestly thought the content got cut off by some scripting bug. I only double checked when I read your comment.
Re: Why Tony Stark is better than you
#20Ironically, your 3-column blog design is not very friendly, IMO. I had to scroll up and down to read that post.
i see 2 columns, so i only had to scroll back up once.