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Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

joshuasortino.com

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Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#11
post #5
post #4

The thing that stood out for me is that over a billion unique people use the service. Does it really underpin that much of the modern Internet?

How many of those are voluntary, active users, though? I see them more as "victims" of it, who are subjected to it without giving much consent at all. Somebody loads a blog article or some other web page that uses Disqus for accepting and showing comments, and without necessarily wanting to use it the page's visitors have become "users" of Disqus.

sheesh. That's a bit much.

The site owner chooses a commenting system. People who want to comment, comment using it. Victims?!

Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#12
post #2

"Engineers should teach engineers GIT, designers should teach designers GIT." is git part of modern design workflow ? how are designers using git ?

At any scale, git is probably not going to be your best bet. svn might actually be a better option as it allows you to checkout just the parts of the repository that you need.

More crucially, it doesn't keep the entire history locally (just working copy and a the latest(ish) version in the repository). This really starts to matter when you have 200mb PSDs.

There are probably even better options out there (though previous searches didn't reveal anything I particularly got on with) - there are certainly better options than git.

Ideally something based around the dropbox model (doing block level deduplication) would be wonderful. Maybe such a product exists?

Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#13
I agree with pretty much everything, except designers using Git. Sadly, Git doesn't work for PSD files properly. Some of the PSD files I've worked with before (900mb+) for larger websites and applications would definitely not be a good fit for Git. Although I think the blame lies mostly on Photoshop's end not being the right tool for web design, but being used by designers anyway. I think whatever tool ends up replacing Photoshop as the de-facto standard (if it happens) should ideally have a visual re-visioning system built in a la Adobe Creative Cloud.

We aren't quite at that point where designers are saving out all of the assets for you, then that would be different. You can source control individual assets, but not a large PSD file properly. I've begun to train the designers at my work to save out assets for pretty much everything leaving me to solve the engineering problems like how everything is going to work and less time cutting out images from a PSD file, but we aren't quite there yet where this is a universal thing that designers just know and willing do.

Some people might disagree with point #6, but I wholeheartedly agree as someone who works for a company where designers design and developers develop. I think to be truly great at design, you need to devote at least 90% of your time (minimum) to bettering your design skills. If you're a developer, the opposite rings true. I think it is important for design/dev to have a mutual understanding of one another, but I don't think you can truly be a great designer and great developer in one. Having an understanding of the other perspective is important. You'll never meet a surgeon who specialises in brain and heart surgery, why should design and development be any different?

Fortunately, the employer I work for doesn't compartmentalise the teams from one another. There is nothing more horrible than working in a place where design and development teams are on separate sides of the office or even different floors with the only communicative layer being a project manager or team leaders. Designers and developers sit down and tackle problems together and educate one another in the process. This is something that happens through the whole process from wire-framing to prototyping to final build. I think designers and developers should work together at every step. I have met talented design/developers, but great ones of both fields are extremely rare.

PS. Joshua, if you're reading this comment, you might want to reconsider the 670kb background image on your site. I loaded your blog on my slow ADSL connection and it was painful.

Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#14
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of those are voluntary, active users, though? I see them more as "victims" of it, who are subjected to it without giving much consent at all. Somebody loads a blog article or some other web page that uses Disqus for accepting and showing comments, and without necessarily wanting to use it the page's visitors have become "users" of Disqus.

sheesh. That's a bit much. The site owner chooses a commenting system. People who want to comment, comment using it. Victims?!

Victims is a pretty loaded term, but it's not an unreasonable accusation. The number of unique monthly users of disqus shouldn't be based on those who unwittingly use it.

Reading your comment again, I wonder what the true definition is. Is the number based on page views? Or is it the number of people who actively interact with the widget (say, posting a comment) after it has loaded? Sounds like you're assuming the later metric while the 'victims' comment is assuming the former.

Edit: thinking about it, 1 billion unique people, that sounds like the victim class to me.

Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#15

I agree with pretty much everything, except designers using Git. Sadly, Git doesn't work for PSD files properly. Some of the PSD files I've worked with before (900mb+) for larger websites and applications would definitely not be a good fit for Git. Although I think the blame lies mostly on Photoshop's end not being the right tool for web design, but being used by designers anyway. I think whatever tool ends up replac…

I'm not a designer, so please enlighten me. What kind of data can be held in a single image for a PSD to be 900 megabytes? Is it a single PSD for hundreds of web pages or?

Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#16
post #9

Would you say #6 and #7 are true generally, or Joshua's opinion? To avoid inefficiency I find having people 'jigsaw-puzzle-piece' shaped helps - it means they're not always waiting on Bob on the desk over there to do the task that's blocking them (even if that task is only "Export an item from a PSD").

#6 is just semantics. Multi-purpose people are great. Rare and exceptional people are great. Designers who can code are great. What does it matter what you call them?

Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#17

I agree with pretty much everything, except designers using Git. Sadly, Git doesn't work for PSD files properly. Some of the PSD files I've worked with before (900mb+) for larger websites and applications would definitely not be a good fit for Git. Although I think the blame lies mostly on Photoshop's end not being the right tool for web design, but being used by designers anyway. I think whatever tool ends up replac…

I'm not a designer, so please enlighten me. What kind of data can be held in a single image for a PSD to be 900 megabytes? Is it a single PSD for hundreds of web pages or?

Tons and tons of layers, I mean literally hundreds.

Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#18

I agree with pretty much everything, except designers using Git. Sadly, Git doesn't work for PSD files properly. Some of the PSD files I've worked with before (900mb+) for larger websites and applications would definitely not be a good fit for Git. Although I think the blame lies mostly on Photoshop's end not being the right tool for web design, but being used by designers anyway. I think whatever tool ends up replac…

I'm not a designer, so please enlighten me. What kind of data can be held in a single image for a PSD to be 900 megabytes? Is it a single PSD for hundreds of web pages or?

[deleted]

Re: Things I Learned Designing at Disqus

#19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a designer, so please enlighten me. What kind of data can be held in a single image for a PSD to be 900 megabytes? Is it a single PSD for hundreds of web pages or?

Tons and tons of layers, I mean literally hundreds.

To elaborate, for anyone who hasn't used Photoshop (in several years): you can have layer groups which act as folders containing several related layers, so when you're browsing layers, it isn't just a mess of 500 some-odd rows.
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