

Ask HN: I'm a designer, who else is? - Inkdryer

Just curious. I think the current method in which designers and developers work together is horribly inefficient and generally broken. I'd like to change that. A designer and developer think differently but I think the first evolutionary step is for each to understand the other and eventually start to think like the other. What do you guys think?
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mnicole
I'd agree with underdesign. I've long-emphasized the point that if you're
working in interaction design or web development as a designer, you need to
know these mediums in-and-out in order to not only be effective, but at this
point in the game, hirable. When someone says they're a web designer, but they
don't write any code or understand the gamut of possibilities, their designs
are going to be lackluster, the workload handed off to the devs will be
greater, and the end-result will likely be discernibly less stellar than if
you were doing it yourself. Not to mention it's fun and far faster to iterate
on if you get your workflow right (LiveReload, CSS pre-processor, etc).

There will always be a place for static designers in print, but the resources
available to developers to make their sites look "good enough" for them (see
the Bootstrap Effect or all of these free asset sites) means you're going to
need to get your hands dirty to stay relevant to companies and freelance devs
alike if you prefer to design for digital mediums.

~~~
Inkdryer
Well said. I'd like to even take it a step further and see designers and
developers really, truly collaborating at every point in the process as
opposed to the traditional model of designing something and handing it off to
a development team. Just as bad is the model of developing a product and then
handing over to a design to "make it look pretty." I'd love to see the teams
all up in each other's grills from the moment of hunch to the shipped product.
Very few teams, if any, work that way now (at least in Ohio) but I'd be
excited to see how each could really challenge the other directly.

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GFischer
underdesign, you appear to have been hellbanned, your posts show as dead to
me.

About the original question, I don't have enough experience working with
designers to answer it :) (though I hope to start working with designers soon
:) )

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Inkdryer
Oh man that sounds serious! What does that mean? Is there a way to get
un"hellbanned"?

~~~
GFischer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning>

"Hellbanning is a practice used by some online community managers for
protecting a community against Internet trolls. The practice involves making a
user invisible to all other users. From the hellbanned user's perspective,
however, they seem to be participating normally in the community. The purpose
of hellbanning is to make it impossible for other users to respond to a
particular user by rendering their contributions invisible"

No idea whether the editors can un-hellban someone. I guess the best if the
user wishes to keep posting to the community is to make a new account.

