The road traveled

Navigating for inspiration

Visiting sites for ideas is one of my favorite things to do early in the morning, I’ll grab a cup of coffee get in front of my laptop and look at various design trends, fonts and dive into code. As someone that likes to develop and design it’s necessary to stay relevant and current with the new hotness as far as web apps go. Here are a few cools sites I’ve been recently checking out:

• SiteInspire
• design/array
• CSS-Tricks
• The Verge
• .NetMagazine

The last two above are really more for staying on top of what’s going on in with tech at the moment.

Man what a Year

As this year quickly comes to a close I have to look back and marvel of how far I’ve come and how much further ahead I must travel. As someone looking to become a full time developer it’s been one hell of a ride. I’ve hunkered down and coded my heart away, racked my brain with multiple design concepts in Photoshop and Fireworks. Made it my priority to create for the user and their experience in mind. Fiddled around with fonts and getting a feel for using the right font for the right content and design (design with content in mind). Interface overhauls and everything in-between soaking up as much knowledge as my mind would allow, and then did it some more in preparation of rolling out my site soon. It’s way over due!

Which way to go?

There are some who are unsure of the role they want to play and that’s fine, it’s perfectly OK to feel your way around as to what you would like to do ultimately and that’s the process of finding your niche. My foundation will always be grounded in design but I’ve made the decision to be a front-end developer. If you think for a moment devs (a good one) need to know design regardless being they work in Photoshop in order to prepare assets used when building out applications. So that’s a no brainer there! So I’ve jumped in with both feet getting more into complex code and applying it to my work. It’s been be a bit nerve wrecking but exciting to say the least.

Strip courtesy of I Am Paddy

The show must go on!

Anyone knows that what you would love to do for a living/career is not easy, nothing comes easy that’s worth doing. So with that thought in mind I continue making connections and becoming friends with others who share my passion and continue to push forward in my studies. I’m looking forward to becoming apart of a great team someday and sharing what I’ve learned as well as learning from them.

For now peace out two fingers. : )

Crossing the Rubicon

design+development=webbuilders?

There’s so much going on right now as it relates to the web 2.0, digital is everywhere whether it’s a website, mobile app/site, e-commerce, video games or interactive experiences. What all of these platforms have in common is that they all need to be built by someone. This brings me to a current thought I had concerning designers and developers, the very people who make all of these wonderful and hopefully useful innovations happen.

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Both play an integral role in the process.

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Designers are responsible for making the site or application LooK the way it does with their knowledge of, color theory, typography and UI design. In addition to using production tools such as adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks including web languages (HTML/CSS, javascript etc.) They also layout how the site will navigate when users interact with it.

Developers are on the other side of the coin sort of. A good developer is well versed in computer languages like the above mentioned and many more… They also tend to delve deeper. Writing clean functional code is what matters most to developers so that the created site will function properly and is maintainable either by themselves or someone else, which usually relates to coding it in CMS if the latter. Another piece of the dev side that needs to be considered is front-end development (client side) or back-end development (client facing). That then brings to languages being broken out for specific uses, html/css, javascript, xml etc…are generally front end client side languages while PHP, SQL, C etc.. are back end server side languages.

I started to ponder how the line between both disciplines are so blurred now to the point that there’s no true blue distinction anymore really, unless an agency is looking for something specific. If you browse today’s job listings whether it’s for a designer position or developer most agencies ask for the applicant to know code from basic html to complex server side languages. Today’s web designer must get into coding and on the other side of the coin developers can make themselves more valuable by getting into design &

motion graphics(Flash, After Effects, Maya 3D etc.)
even though now with html5 canvas tag you can convert flash objects into native web applications. This in itself makes developers more useful and takes a little away from web designers giving designers more reason to study and learn code further blurring the line.

I feel that the line is so blurred and skewed at this point even titles should change in my opinion. I think at this point the term “web designer” or “web developer” is null in void, it’s probably more appropriate to just merge the two and title them web builders.