June 21, 2007

Designer/Developer Synergy

Before working at Planet Argon, I’ve never worked for a company that was made up of mostly developers. At the beginning, I wasn’t sure how I would fit in being that my skillset had very little overlap with my newly-acquainted comrades. Not a huge deal considering I’m a designer and I wasn’t necessarily hired to know these things, but I felt it was my duty to at least make an attempt to learn.

Over the past 7 months, I’ve learned a considerable amount from the developers, and gasp, it’s not all that difficult.

Here’s the 4 things that every designer should know when working with developers:

1. Command Line: Otherwise known as Bash on OS X/Unix. Before I started at PA, my thoughts were “Why the hell do I need the command line when I can do all the same things through the GUI, silly developers always making things so complicated!” I was totally wrong, the command line seems daunting at first for a n00b designer, but after learning some basic commands, it makes a lot of simple tasks (such as creating/moving/renaming directories) so much easier. Not only that, it is probably the most used tool that developers use.

2. Subversion: After learning some basic Bash commands, the next step was learning about Subversion and all its goodness. Version control is an essential for team of developers, or even if you are a freelance. As a designer, I’ve only had to learn a handful of svn commands (svn co, svn up, svn ci, svn st to name a few). There’s also a textmate bundle for the faint of heart. There’s really no excuse a designer can give to learn a few simple commands.

3. HTML & CSS: This one seems a bit obvious, but believe it or not, there are actually web designers out there that are still clueless when it comes to HTML & CSS. Most of these designers are “converts” from the print world and I use convert loosely because if these so called web designers don’t know HTML and CSS then they are not web designers–they are hacks. Designers can not design for the web if they do not know the limitations of the web, and there’s no way to know the limitations unless you know the fundamentals of the web.

4. Ruby on Rails or your preferred programming language: If you are a designer that learned how to develop, then you have came full circle. You are one of the few that have mastered both disciplines in two different spectrums of the web industry. I applaud you.

What else do you think designers should be required to learn before/while working with a development team?