Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 March 2005 10:53:36
I was a little shocked to read this article from Mr Zeldman regarding how web designers and developers go about building a system. He says that the question "what do users want?" isn't asked enough. While I would agree with that, to a certain extent, I don't believe it to be typical at all. After all, who are we building these systems for? The people that pay the bills, of course, but also the end users.
I couldn't possibly dream of writing a system without putting myself in the driving seat, as it were. Designing for designings sake is nothing more than graphical masturbation, and developing for developings sake is ... well, it's just sad. Mind you, I shouldn't be too surprised about Zeldman saying what he said in that article - he is known for having a cynical attitude towards design in general.
In other news... I had an interesting conversation with someone called Dave (I think) who I bumped into at my local bookshop. We (la inamorata and I) had just finished our very large and very fattening coffees, and I decided to look for a book about advanced DOM scripting. Dave was sat on the floor in front of the shelf I need to look at, and we got chatting. It turned out that he is a graphic designer with a particular passion for typography, who is starting to get into web design. Like a good web standards evangelist I encouraged him to learn about CSS, and gave him my card with a few useful web addresses that would help him. Hopefully he'll be in touch, as I'm very interested in getting to know more designers/developers in the local area. Perhaps there's a nearby group which I could join?
Anyway, because that's yet another time I've passed on the same links to yet another person just getting into web design, I thought I'd put all these links into a useful reference page. So when my new website goes live - which shouldn't be too long now - I'll add a link here.