Aridae.com

I end up spending a lot of time talking about the relationships between designers and developers; how to help them work together and also how to survive on your own when you (the designer or the developer) is left alone to cover both bases.  Lately a number of people have pointed out how both of these topics would be moot if a single person could actually fill both roles – to steal a friend’s term, A Devigner.  Then it seems like the next step in that conversation is always either “so.. where do we get one?” or “how do I become one?”

I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture here, but the population of people on the dev/design graph is basically the opposite of a bell curve.  Typically a person is really good at one or the other skillset and may have interest in moving towards the other end.  If you’re one of those people, that’s fantastic!  The development world wants you probably more than you’ve guessed and just by having the inclination you’ve already taken a healthy step towards the middle.

So how do you take more steps to the middle? To the designers in the audience, I’m taking these steps myself and will hold my judgement of my path for when I get somewhere.  For developers, I know you have resources on the design side (myself included) who want to help you come our way a little.  First I would suggest discovering what it is about the design side that interests you.  If we assume I meant “UX Design” up above every time I wrote just “design” then you have more options than the dreaded “Make it pretty” – visual design is, of course, a fascet of what we do, but there’s more to making an application enjoyable to use than what it looks like and any effort put toward that goal is never wasted.

Any successful UX designer is going to be at least familiar with each of the following fields of study:

• usability
• information architecture
• interaction design
• graphic design

Anything a developer can learn about these topics will take them closer and closer to being the elusive “devigner,” and a passion for making your user’s task easier and more enjoyable is certainly a leap in the right direction.

If you’ve ever visited my site before you’re probably wondering if this is the same place.  Well, it is.  I’m in the middle of migrating to a new blogging platform & still working out the kinks, so please be patient.  Especially with my downloaded, designed-by-someone-I-don’t-know-template.  Ugh.  (Nothing against the person who made this, I just like to do my own )

Unfortunately, I had to abandon blogengine.net as my ….blog engine today.  Even bigger unfortunately, blogengine.net does NOT support any sort of migration.  I managed to salvage my posts, but I have lost all the comments people had left.  Needless to say I am annoyed.  The other thing of note is that if anyone had left a comment and was then email-spammed by what appeared to be me I am extremely sorry.  That was the original catalyst that got me off of blogengine & I am hoping that the problem will not persist now.

Thanks for stopping by & don’t mind the mess!