Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
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Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#2Design work is dotted with long periods of thinking and exploring. You only need a high APM rate because photoshop terribly sucks for anything other than manipulating bitmaps, you can do things much faster in an object-based editor like Fireworks. If only Adobe would make it 100% compatible with PSDs and actually mantain it, it would completely take over web design.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#3Design work is dotted with long periods of thinking and exploring. You only need a high APM rate because photoshop terribly sucks for anything other than manipulating bitmaps, you can do things much faster in an object-based editor like Fireworks. If only Adobe would make it 100% compatible with PSDs and actually mantain it, it would completely take over web design.
The fastest wireframers I know seem to use Illustrator, which like you said is object-based. Good point.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#4I just wanted to say that Anand Sharma is a gentleman and a scholar. And a phenomenal designer! Anand is responsible for much of the design of our site (http://theory11.com). Unbelievably talented.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#5I used to hear this argument from WoW players a lot.
"It's skills you use in every business management, so it's just like work!"
Go ahead and list it on your resume if you believe it.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#6There's an unusually high number of commenters on that website who have never heard of let alone played Starcraft.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#7I especially like the APM analogy. The best designers I know make using photoshop/illustrator look like playing a piano
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#8I used to hear this argument from WoW players a lot. "It's skills you use in every business management, so it's just like work!" Go ahead and list it on your resume if you believe it.
An important distinction is that there are no characters to level-up in Starcraft, so you can't get "better" by just investing mindless hours into the game. The start of a Starcraft game is just like the start of a Chess game: both newbies and pros have the same options in front of them. You have to objectively improve as a player to win more Starcraft.
I never played WoW, but I would believe that there are some different managerial aspects to running a guild or organizing raids with 40 other players.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#9Design work is dotted with long periods of thinking and exploring. You only need a high APM rate because photoshop terribly sucks for anything other than manipulating bitmaps, you can do things much faster in an object-based editor like Fireworks. If only Adobe would make it 100% compatible with PSDs and actually mantain it, it would completely take over web design.
I think the article would be the same no matter which tool he were using. It's about a process of fast iterations in design, which is possible when you're this comfortable with the tool. I'd compare it to using dev tools to mock up a website, it just reduces friction for something you could do manually.
Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft
#10Isn't the title a bit imprecise? It seems the article is about leveraging things you learn playing starcraft to better use some software tools, not how starcraft gives you lessons about good design.