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Designing in the browser can result poor results in my experience and in another designer I've seen. That's not a universal thing but something to be weary of. Both sketch and adobe offer 30 day trials.
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May 26, 2015 12:16
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On the other hand, if you don't use the browser, you're just postponing the part where you learn how everything actually works.
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May 26, 2015 12:24
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an skeleton posted:I want to get better at design [...] I don't know how to use Adobe suite [...] I have no formal training. I don't want to necessarily be a dedicated designer, I just want to know enough to be dangerous and to be able to collaborate with designers intelligently. You may have to clarify further; like do you want to be designing in terms of building HTML and CSS, doing the cut and be able to discuss the ins and outs of implementation in the design.. or do you want to be able to talk about UX, colours, spacing and kerning, and make that face when someone tells you it doesn't "pop"? What sort of conversations do you need to be able to have with design? These things are usually separate parts of a full process, each equally valuable, each their own black magic. There's always cross-over and people who do both. If you want to be one of those, then just google for everything and read everything.
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May 26, 2015 12:42
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Thermopyle posted:I'm about to do a landing page for gathering emails for an upcoming product.
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May 26, 2015 13:11
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Data Graham posted:On the other hand, if you don't use the browser, you're just postponing the part where you learn how everything actually works. It's still IMO, easier to design something cool and then figuring out the code required if you don't know it versus starting in an editor. Also unless you're using an add on, extension, of website service you're not going to come up with good colors designing in a browser.
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May 26, 2015 14:27
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The Dave posted:Designing in the browser can result poor results in my experience and in another designer I've seen. That's not a universal thing but something to be weary of. Both sketch and adobe offer 30 day trials. I agree, and I actually start off in Sketch. Just pointing out that not knowing Illustrator (or not wanting to pay for it) wasn't a deal breaker, and that you can get your feet wet with $EDITOR and your browser. Another great read on web design I remembered: https://ia.net/know-how/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period
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May 26, 2015 14:34
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Lumpy posted:I agree, and I actually start off in Sketch. Just pointing out that not knowing Illustrator (or not wanting to pay for it) wasn't a deal breaker, and that you can get your feet wet with $EDITOR and your browser. 1. Cross-Platform 2. Not so arrogant about OS X.
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May 26, 2015 15:13
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The Merkinman posted:I really wish Sketch were: Me too. It's a pretty neat app.
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May 26, 2015 16:42
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Lumpy posted:The big thing to keep in mind to be a good designer is "why". WHY did you pick that font size? WHY did you choose that line-height, that padding, that color? I second this. Since you're a developer who has no intention of trying to become a designer, the best thing you can do is to better understand why a designer makes the decisions they do so that you can better focus on applying them correctly. There is nothing more infuriating than a developer who lacks an attention for details. There's a reason why I gave that block of text 200px of breathing room on the top and bottom. No, giving it 40px "just like all the rest of the elements on the page, it's one less line of CSS..." is not a viable alternative. You'll learn a lot more from working with a designer who is willing to teach you a bit than you will from reading any book or blog.
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May 26, 2015 17:15
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Lumpy posted:Read that Medium article up about 5 posts and the first part of it as well. Hit up sidebar.io and flip back through the last month, reading every design article. Read through the last few months of A List Apart's design focused articles. The big thing to keep in mind to be a good designer is "why". WHY did you pick that font size? WHY did you choose that line-height, that padding, that color? While it is extremely important to be able to articulate the reasons behind design decisions, it becomes less important as you move further into "pure" UX. A UX designer does most of their work before there's any conversation about what it looks like, if they're even responsible for the visual design at all. In that case, it is more important that the UX designer foster a sense of shared decision making throughout the team and grounds the design in user feedback through testing and data. For example, it's the UX designer's job to make the case that users are lazy and want to see information in context so it isn't surprising when, as a developer, you are asked to munge together a bunch of different data sources into a single widget instead of just adding a button or a field for each and calling it a day. Designers bitching about "trivial" visual issues is annoying, to be sure, but it's the days of extra development time to fundamentally affect how things work that should feel intentionally designed. A good designer should have invited you to review meetings to go over why they're thinking about something so complicated and make sure the scope is ultimately manageable.
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May 26, 2015 17:21
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Kobayashi posted:While it is extremely important to be able to articulate the reasons behind design decisions, it becomes less important as you move further into "pure" UX. A UX designer does most of their work before there's any conversation about what it looks like, if they're even responsible for the visual design at all. In that case, it is more important that the UX designer foster a sense of shared decision making throughout the team and grounds the design in user feedback through testing and data. UX design is a very, very different beast that graphic design indeed. I assumed he meant "graphic and or UI design", but this is quite an excellent post regardless.
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May 26, 2015 17:29
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My primary/most immediate concern would be UI/graphic Design but the better UX sensibility I can get, the better
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May 26, 2015 17:49
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Lumpy posted:UX design is a very, very different beast that graphic design indeed. I assumed he meant "graphic and or UI design", but this is quite an excellent post regardless. Absolutely agree. Design is complicated. Just like engineering, there is a lot of variety and a lot of specialization. As a very crude analogy, visual and UI designers are like frontend engineers in that their primary concerns are what is presented to the user. Information architects and interaction designers are kind of like backend engineers in that they think about what happens behind the scenes. A UX designer is kind of like a full stack engineer in that they are generalists. And, just like engineering, there are a lot of lovely designers who don't have any formal training. In general, I'd say Lumpy's advice is spot on -- it's about the WHY. I'd add that the farther away from the actual pixels on screen you get, the less you should accept "I THINK..." as an answer. When it comes to visual design, as frustrating as it might be for the logical thinker, gut feel is a huge part of the final result. Once you start talking about how things work though, the conversation shouldn't be about opinions. It should be about a explicit assumptions that make the design feel like the obvious choice (e.g. "our business goal is X and we thought about Y and Z but when we tested a quick mockup, users responded overwhelmingly to Y"). In practice, it's never that straightforward, but the debate should be more about the underlying assumptions and how to validate them rather than any specific design. an skeleton posted:My primary/most immediate concern would be UI/graphic Design but the better UX sensibility I can get, the better In addition to what everyone else said, I would add that you should just dive in. Take the next design you're given and see if you can reproduce it from scratch in Sketch or Photoshop. Do the same for other sites you find interesting. If you get stuck on a particular effect ask your designer to show you how they did it. Start by mimicking, then try remix things and ask for feedback. On the UX front, take the next non-trivial feature you work on. Get a notebook, give yourself 10 or 15 minutes, and try to come up with all the alternate ways of solving that problem that you can. Don't spend any time thinking about practicality. Focus on quantity. If you get stuck, do something silly like assume a magic wand exists. Pretend you have infinite time or infinite budget. Pretend your users have perfect knowledge or computers have infinite specs. Ignore all your previous constraints. Once you're done brainstorming, begin to layer on real world constraints again, pick the best options and riff on those. Iterating toward a final solution by alternating between divergent and convergent thinking is the basic process behind UX design.
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May 26, 2015 18:31
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So I finally finished the Treehouse Front End Web Development course over the course of the past 5 months. gently caress me with a rusty spork that was hard; one of the most difficult learning experiences of my life. You fellas are practically unsung heroes, how do you do it?
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May 26, 2015 18:49
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Parrotine posted:So I finally finished the Treehouse Front End Web Development course over the course of the past 5 months. Years of learning and experience vs 5 months of intense cramming.
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May 26, 2015 19:08
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Parrotine posted:gently caress me with a rusty spork that was hard; one of the most difficult learning experiences of my life. You fellas are practically unsung heroes, how do you do it? Google, mostly.
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May 26, 2015 19:14
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kedo posted:Google, mostly. Yep.
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May 26, 2015 20:46
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Parrotine posted:So I finally finished the Treehouse Front End Web Development course over the course of the past 5 months. The drinking helped for a while. Then I started doing mostly iOS development. Now I mostly take care of my kid and rock back and forth holding my knees when nobody is around.
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May 26, 2015 20:59
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Parrotine posted:So I finally finished the Treehouse Front End Web Development course over the course of the past 5 months. Throw poo poo at a wall until something sticks, that is, just keep practicing and making stuff and slowly you'll figure it out. Treehouse is awesome and I've done much of that course myself but everything I've "learned" has come from making dumb projects and Googling stuff.
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May 27, 2015 04:07
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Working on a team goes a long way as well. You tend to learn things from osmosis.
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May 27, 2015 12:57
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This might be a dumb question, but I've read the UX talk on this page and figured now would be as good a time as any. After graduating design school I got hired by a design studio that specializes in magazine design, mostly. Some reports and such too, but basically I have 8 years of experience all in print. Obviously I should have switched jobs ages ago, but they kept giving me raises and things got comfortable. Anyway, long story short I am finding myself wanting a change but I'm so specialized that obviously my options are limited. I know some basic HTML and CSS, but I don't know that I'd ever catch up if I have to learn coding from scratch. I can give it a try if that's what's best though! I find myself overwhelmed looking at all the different options out there in the digital world, does anyone have any thoughts on a good area for me to start? I'm pretty clueless about it all, but eager to learn.
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May 27, 2015 16:39
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triplexpac posted:This might be a dumb question, but I've read the UX talk on this page and figured now would be as good a time as any. It depends on what you want to do! I tend to think of UX in terms of yes, and? That is, you can call yourself a UX designer, but you need to bring at least one core competency to the table. The big ones are visual design, technical skills, and research. A UX designer who can't conduct their own user research, can't prototype their designs, and has to hand their wireframes off to a dedicated visual designer limits their career to all but the largest companies. While learning to code is important for UX design, it is less so for a UX designer with very strong visual design skills. UX design is the hot, shiny field right now because it promises to free (digital) designers from their little box at the end of the process, when they're asked to "make it pretty" well after all the hosed up product decisions have already been made. But not every designer needs to jump on the UX bandwagon. The industry needs good visual designers who understand digital as a medium. If you're good at what you do and you know HTML/CSS well enough to think about your designs in terms of adaptive/responsive layouts, multiple pixel resolutions, finger-sized touch targets, font substitutions, accessibility, etc. then you are well positioned to make the jump from print to digital. If that all sounds obvious to you, then with your experience you could probably get a cushy job as a senior visual designer for a year to establish your bona fides and then switch over to a digital agency at the creative director level. If not, then you may be looking at more of a step down from your current position until you get your digital skills up. And if you really do want to do UX more broadly, then you should check out some of the links from earlier. Either way, I don't think you necessarily need to worry too much about coding right now unless it's really something you're interested in.
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May 27, 2015 17:25
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my bony fealty posted:Throw poo poo at a wall until something sticks, that is, just keep practicing and making stuff and slowly you'll figure it out. Treehouse is awesome and I've done much of that course myself but everything I've "learned" has come from making dumb projects and Googling stuff. Got it, i'll start giving this a try. I just created a GitHub account! Does anyone here have an account that I could follow? I'm still trying to navigate the mess that is Front End Development, so every little bit helps! My username is Parrotine if that helps
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May 27, 2015 18:00
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Parrotine posted:Got it, i'll start giving this a try. I'm chrishouse, but all I've got up there is a couple demo repos and a fork of the REM-unit-polyfill project (to which I made a very, very minor contribution). I use Beanstalk for all my web project repos.
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May 27, 2015 18:59
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Kobayashi posted:It depends on what you want to do! Thanks for the advice! I only brought up UX because I see it in job postings everywhere these days. As you say, it's the new shiny thing I guess. For now I'm just going to practice, and try to get some digital work in my portfolio. Ideally finding a programmer to pair up with would be great, that way I can get some real world work done rather than just pie in the sky Photoshop mockups or whatever. At this stage of my career I think having actual real projects in my portfolio is key.
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May 27, 2015 20:34
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Parrotine posted:Got it, i'll start giving this a try. I'm battaile, you can follow my hilarious misadventures as I reinvent the wheel with my node-based static site generator.
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May 27, 2015 20:52
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Read the book "UX Team of One" and see if that sort of stuff interests you.
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May 27, 2015 22:32
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I'm not really sure where to post this question, so, here goes: The hosted CMS my agency uses is not HIPPA-compliant, and since switching to a different one is out of the question for the short term, the solution I've come up with for clients that require HIPPA compliance is: - implement on our CMS as usual - create a flat HTML version of the site using wget on the temp URL recursively - use find and replace to remove <script> tags that are no longer needed and causes console errors - upload the flat HTML version to a HIPPA-compliant host Obviously, this makes updates a bit labor-intensive, and I'd like to automate this whole process so that it occurs automatically. My initial thought was Node since I'm already comfortable with Javascript, but I can't really find any modules that replicate this particular use case of wget. Anyone ever had to do anything similar to this? I'm a front-end dev who is way out of his comfort zone, so alternative ideas are absolutely welcome.
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May 27, 2015 22:45
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Parrotine posted:Got it, i'll start giving this a try. Feel free to follow me: https://github.com/neurotech/ I'm in the middle of redesigning my personal website at the moment, you can check out it's repo here: https://github.com/neurotech/timdouglas.co
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May 28, 2015 10:07
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Does anyone else get irritated when looking at a new/interesting library then the only way to get it is through composer or nodejs or bower or something? Just give me a zip download!
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May 29, 2015 12:48
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No? Just download it off github if you want the files? I fail to see the problem.Can you provide an example?
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May 29, 2015 13:02
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v1nce posted:No? Just download it off github if you want the files? I fail to see the problem.Can you provide an example? http://phonegap.com/install/ It's not always immediately obvious that you can just grab something off github, and when you do it's not always clear exactly what you need since that usually includes the repository in its entirety including all the source files.
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May 29, 2015 15:54
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This might be the wrong place but does anyone have any good resources for processes / frameworks to go through for the branding / marketing side of launching a new product? I'm trying to become the guy at work that ushers in the branding of new projects and I wanted to see if there were already good frameworks to follow versus me bullshitting in google docs.
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May 29, 2015 16:21
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nexus6 posted:http://phonegap.com/install/ Well in that case it appears to be a Node.js program, so to use it at all you'd already have npm installed, and it's easier to get it installed and running by using npm than doing it all yourself (aside from getting the whole source from Github, which is basically the executable anyway since it's a Node.js program, so the source is just interpreted when you run it). For client side libraries though, yeah that is annoying. Bower in general also just seems weird to have compared to just using npm or a CDN or managing the files yourself.
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May 30, 2015 00:37
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Is this thread the appropriate place for a question about libcurl? I have some code that's just meant to check whether the SSL certificates our service requires are installed on the client machine, and does so by making a connection. This works perfectly on several machines, but our QA guy has some VMs that return a CURLE_UNKNOWN_PROTOCOL error. The url it's contacting is hardcoded with an "https://" prefix, so I don't understand how the protocol would be different on different machines. Anyone have any ideas?
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Jun 1, 2015 01:36
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Chances are that the VMs don't have all the required libs installed to support SSL over CURL. Here's a stack overflow answer about how to check for https support in curl under PHP And perhaps take a look at this stack overflow answer which might help nudge you in the right direction.
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Jun 1, 2015 04:28
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I'm still learning the whole HTTP flow, but had a quick question. I want to make a form that's broken apart to multiple pages. I understand that POST creates data, but how should I go about updating the data over and over on each page? Should I make two separate methods - the first form submission is HttpPost, refresh the screen (Ajax) and then all subsequent form submits are HttpPut? I want the user to be able to click Save at any time on any page to save the that form's parts via Ajax. e: found a good article explaining PUT vs POST, so I think I'll only POST the partial form parts. Apparently PUT is only recommended when submitting all fields, but POST for partial fields. kloa fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Jun 1, 2015 |
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Jun 1, 2015 14:43
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You can keep the information in the cookies (session) and then store all the data into the DB on the last step.
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Jun 1, 2015 16:25
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I tend to avoid full-page POSTs like the plague, and instead do everything with AJAX. I don't even use <form> tags anymore; I just serialize everything manually in JS. My feeling is that if you've navigated to a given page, that page is itself an "application", and all your interactions with the data in it should take place within that app's "runtime", i.e. without requiring the page to be reloaded for any reason. The browser should not be required to navigate from a page to itself, or put spurious entries into its history. You should be able to go back to a page at any time and get a fresh complete session without having to worry about state or which entry in the history is the "right" one. I've actually been asking myself whether this is because I just have such a deep-seated aversion to the classic browser behavior with POSTed data—"You hit Back, are you sure you want to submit the data again? How about now? Shall I send your credit card information too, along with this Delete command?" —or if it's actually got some merit to it. Can someone comment on this practice? Is it becoming "standard" nowadays to do all form interactions via JS/AJAX, and never subject the user to a history-breaking workflow interruption or confirmation prompt? Are there hidden dangers? I know there's the "accessibility" argument, i.e. text-mode browsers and screenreaders for the blind and so on, but isn't even that becoming less of a consideration as accessibility tools themselves get better?
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Jun 1, 2015 20:47
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I've been moving away from AJAX unless it's a feature that requires some sort of realtime interaction between the user and browser. AJAX is a QA nightmare and makes debugging things a lot harder. I guess I just like my websites to act like websites. BTW with post->redirect->get you don't really get the 'do you want to resubmit?' issue.
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Jun 1, 2015 22:00
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