Well this is interesting, if you are a person who is somehow related to web, who spend ridiculous amount of time fixing CSS & XHTML that should work perfectly in IE6, IE7 then i guess this is an interesting discovery.
Microsoft recently revamped there windows website with a new layout to tell the world “What is windows Live?” so instead of checking out windows live i said why not check out how Microsoft writes its markup and what i found was a bit disturbing, on the top of the page was a css hack to load a separate style sheet for IE7 as the original style sheet was not compatible with IE7.
Radiohead one of my favorite band is always creative with there videos, recently Radiohead came up with a new video ‘House of Cards’ from there new album ‘In Rainbows’. The key point of this video was that it was created without the use of cameras & lights. No its not animated video rather the video was produced by capturing 3D images using two technology companies ‘Geometric Informatics & Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.
Its sort of a digital video compromised of digital data manipulate. Even Google loved there idea and some of there data is available on Google’s code website which you can use to incorporate your own visualization.
Finally the day arrived when i received a clear cut warning from a doctor that son its quite early for you to receive this warning and its time you quite smoking. Ah the word ‘quite smoking‘ was more painful then anything else, for years i enjoyed the taste of tobacco and when ever some one argued on smoke free environments i was the first one to protest against it. Sometime i use to be like ‘Nick Naylor‘ from the movie from ‘Thank you for smoking‘. But yes now i have to quite smoking.
So today Firefox sends email to all his members who pledged to download firefox on the Firefox download day and help firefox set a world record and today :
We did it! We set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. With your help we reached 8,002,530 downloads.You are now part of a World Record and the proud owner of the best version of Firefox yet!
The field of web cannot survive without designers & developers who work in a combination to make things happen. But there is one constrain that is always time taking, lacks resource and cause issue when the design meets the logic.
Pure designer know one thing best that is make layouts that look visually pleasing, colors that bring the Wao effect as soon as you see and typography that just compels you to read. Stuff like this does look amazing on photoshop or a jpg mock up but if you some how hand over your baby to developers there is chance the line height might change, correct font might not be used and maybe the little curve that you put on the top disappears. Stuff like this do happen, designers restrain from coding even HTML / CSS while developers restrain from looking into details.
When ever i conducted interviews for design job and asked if they know how to code html / css there was a “no we don’t” answer and strong resistance to such a query, stating it a technical and non creative job. Is coding non creative … then who said “Code is Poetry” a quote written on the footer of wordpress.
I never resisted from coding to xhtml / css / Javascript & using of jQuery as well rather i fell for it, css is like a beauty for my design and a challenge to solve design problems keeping technical details in hand, if web is limited to 4-5 fonts only i know that when i design, if something in css is impossible i would know and might not put that in my design, in my view coding helps designer visualize better and keep the design he build intact with technical constrains. If i know what can be done with jQuery i can make my layout screen that will make use of it as well.
Being a big fan of 37signals there way of working [4 days of work week], there products and the company itself i have been very inspired by there posts specially the one i recently read “Designer who also develop have more power” it raised a very questionable thought in mind and makes a very strong sense on the benefits if a designer can code or a developer who can design. The most compelling benefit is that things getting done quickly, no one is dependent on another.
Here i will put forward two scenarios say a developer receives layouts for an application as big as facebook, now the layout will be probably be 5-10 pages designed in photoshop delivered work begins and developers finds out there are 10 more pages that are quite similar but the data type & its arrangement has changed what should be done … the work comes to an hold and designer is activated again who spends another day in completing those layout sending them over and so on.
Keep the same scenario and convert the developer into a designer / developer so would there be any halt…. would that person be more resourceful and an asset to the company / client he presents ?
