Future of Web Design 2007: Designing for developers
Thursday, April 19, 2007Comment, or trackback from your own site.
Designing for developers
Andy Clarke, Stuff and nonsense
http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/downloads/fowd.zip
“it doesn’t matter the colour of the car, but what goes on beneath the bonnet” - billy bragg - a lover sings
Sums up the divide between visual designers and developers
Top Gear cool wall but for websites
Are Yahoo cool? No.
Yahoo are moving up to the sub-zero category apparently, Andy Clarke puts it on the seriously uncool part
Twitter - not cool, twitter API is cool though.
Digg - doesn’t use visualisation, and the conversations aren’t very interesting - populated by 17-year-olds, uncool
Microsoft - uncool (sponsors!!)
Dropsend - rad! (says Ryan Carson) cool because no-one uses it (rawr!)
Flickr - achieved a superb brand loyalty over photobucket etc - sub-zero
What we’re trying to do is create products that people love to use
Brand experience
Honda CR-V - uncool car but Clarke’s been driving it for 11 years. He doesn’t know about it under the hood, but it works really well.
If we look under the hood of things, there will be stuff that people don’t understand .We don’t have to understand the intracacies of every single part of every part of the app we’re making.
So what do designers do for a living? What is a web designer?
How can web designers best interface with other people in the industry to avoid making massive oily messes?
Richard - setting up a site called reallyworried.com - advice/social networking/blogging site
Richard didn’t appreciate that Clarke isn’t just someone who chooses colours and whatnot
What he got from Clarke as a designer was more than making the pages look pretty: work on functionality/usability
Designers often very separate to development team. Sometimes IA people too.
Detailed wireframes before design doesn’t leave room for design flexibility
Wireframes take ages to do
Photoshop comps of every single page - take ages to do too.
Does every piece of the project need to be mapped out in a mass-produced car factory kindof of way? Probably not.
The process itself is not very creative.
Instead:
Roughly what goes where? (less prescriptive) - jason santa maria
Reams of documentation / func spec not necessary - grey boxes which say ‘what goes where’
Avoid hangovers from other media
Designer - wants to communicate the essence of what it’s about - the brand values
For really worried - just one photoshop comp for the whole site
General colour pallette and to show what goes where
Big advocate of using XHTML and CSS in the design process to create meaningful prototypes
How do you design liquid layouts? How do you specify how the text scales up?
How make something static show dynamic workflow?
How do you communicate interaction and error messages on forms?
Did XHTML/CSS prototypes solely in firefox
95% of stuff made it through to the final project and a fair amount of time was saved
Write notes on top of design layout to communicate meaning - perhaps with suggested markup guides in the comp
“as an interface designer I can use microformats and then people who actually know what they are doing can do really col stuff with the data” - dan cederholm
