Bridging the Gap
Saturday, June 30th, 2007
Many application developers have no formal graphic design or multimedia training, yet they produce applications that are experienced visually or aurally. In many cases, programmers primarily concern themselves with the quality of the functionality that they develop in their applications giving little thought to the quality of feedback the program provides the user (the user experience). Aritists who work in development environments seldom concern themselves with anything but layout and design. Many multimedia developers don’t really take to creating the art assets or touching the codebase that utilizes their content, but are comfortable scripting in their own environment.
In the world of today, it is taken for granted that applications will work, that they will be attractive and that they will provide high quality feedback. Working within our “comfort zones”, we can not produce as high a quality of work as what would be possibly if we could “speak each others languages”. In a world where specialization is king, eventually the people who can communicate across occupational boundaries will be the most sought after and the most highly paid folks around.
We are interested in breaking people out of their comfort zones and enabling them to cross occupational boundaries. We are not suggesting that you should give up all your training time to pursue previously undeveloped skills in art, design or programming. We are suggesting that it would be to your benifit to broaden your skills to include things not directly in your area of specialization. How much or how little is up to you.
We can see the benefit to the community of offering seminars covering art, design and programming from the perspective of what would be valuable to practioners of other disciplines. If you’d be interested in learning aspects of someone else’s purview, please leave a comment below. Comments should be targeted to give us an idea of what to cover. An example of a good comment might be:
I am a web programmer that works primarily with part time or freelance designers. Our shop has 3-5 programmers, and we are all extremely busy working on a large scale project. Whenever we are presenting a work in progress to the client, we like to make on the spot layout/style changes if possible to respond to the client, but our designers aren’t always available. I believe it would be helpful to know how to do a minimum of things in CSS to perform these changes when our designers are out of the office.
Let us know what types of skills you think you would benefit from learning about to help you out in your daily development life. Being an effective member of a multi-disciplinary team can often mean crossing those occupational boundaries to get the job done. Let us help you to do so.
