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Ask HN: I'm a designer, who else is?

5 points by Inkdryer ↗ HN
Just curious. I think the current method in which designers and developers work together is horribly inefficient and generally broken. I'd like to change that. A designer and developer think differently but I think the first evolutionary step is for each to understand the other and eventually start to think like the other. What do you guys think?

6 comments

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[dead] underdesign
Learn programming. Now you're both. Works for me.
GFischer
underdesign, you appear to have been hellbanned, your posts show as dead to me.

About the original question, I don't have enough experience working with designers to answer it :) (though I hope to start working with designers soon :) )

Inkdryer
Oh man that sounds serious! What does that mean? Is there a way to get un"hellbanned"?
GFischer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning

"Hellbanning is a practice used by some online community managers for protecting a community against Internet trolls. The practice involves making a user invisible to all other users. From the hellbanned user's perspective, however, they seem to be participating normally in the community. The purpose of hellbanning is to make it impossible for other users to respond to a particular user by rendering their contributions invisible"

No idea whether the editors can un-hellban someone. I guess the best if the user wishes to keep posting to the community is to make a new account.

mnicole
I'd agree with underdesign. I've long-emphasized the point that if you're working in interaction design or web development as a designer, you need to know these mediums in-and-out in order to not only be effective, but at this point in the game, hirable. When someone says they're a web designer, but they don't write any code or understand the gamut of possibilities, their designs are going to be lackluster, the workload handed off to the devs will be greater, and the end-result will likely be discernibly less stellar than if you were doing it yourself. Not to mention it's fun and far faster to iterate on if you get your workflow right (LiveReload, CSS pre-processor, etc).

There will always be a place for static designers in print, but the resources available to developers to make their sites look "good enough" for them (see the Bootstrap Effect or all of these free asset sites) means you're going to need to get your hands dirty to stay relevant to companies and freelance devs alike if you prefer to design for digital mediums.

Inkdryer
Well said. I'd like to even take it a step further and see designers and developers really, truly collaborating at every point in the process as opposed to the traditional model of designing something and handing it off to a development team. Just as bad is the model of developing a product and then handing over to a design to "make it look pretty." I'd love to see the teams all up in each other's grills from the moment of hunch to the shipped product. Very few teams, if any, work that way now (at least in Ohio) but I'd be excited to see how each could really challenge the other directly.