Re: frontend web development
@34
A more direct answer to your question is the problem that making a website appealing is subjectively arbitrary. Just because the person you asked didn't like the font, font size, padding, or colors, doesn't mean others wouldn't like it, or how many wouldn't like it. This makes the question of making an "appealing" site a moving target, which makes it very hard to give a straight forward answer to your question. This has a lot of parallel's to Art, which is both subjective and fluid to say the least, and which can also be frequently used in frontend development, depending on the application. So, the question instead may be less about making an appealing site, but more a better understanding of common designs conventions and standards.
So, with that in mind the most I can offer is a few suggestions. To help build a better understanding of current conventions and the relationship between visual displays and code, you could try asking people to describe in excruciating detail different kinds of websites, to get a sense of whats out there and what other people are doing for design. Also keep in mind the underlying sites content and function when doing this. You can also have them describe the site your working on to get a better understanding of the relationship between code and display.
Avoid suggestions like "This looks good", or "I like X", or "No thats bad" without explicit explanations and details for why. There is an inherent risk of subjective bias in those kinds of descriptions that you may want to avoid, part of this is finding what you like, and determining that involves having an objective view. Don't let people do the work for you, this is about the learning and experience in the long term, not the immediate task at hand. You can also try using tools like The vOICe or BrushTone for getting a sonified look at different scales and segments of the website, in combination with color filtering to try and observe the layout yourself. There are a few tricks you can use to change the color scheme of the CSS script to help make the padding and layouts easier to parse. Again, keep the sites content and function in mind in relation to these things.
If you have any more questions, we can try talking about it further and see where it goes.
@33
I understand what your trying to say, there are gradients and cirumstances people may be more well suited to than others. But trying to define who is or isn't a frontend dev becomes an inherently slippery slope. What level of complexity of design would qualify as sufficient to be considered a frontend dev? From whom would that validation come from? It may ultimately be besides the point anyway.
Previous visual experience is also a fair point, to a degree. Studies on the spacial cognition of the blind conducted by psychologist John M. Kennedy indicated that people with brief periods of early visual perception had an easier time relating to spacial concepts such as depth, perspective, and the same methodologies the sighted develop over time. You can find reference to his work [here] and [here]. Note however that I said it makes it easier for those with visual experience, not impossible without it, and this is illustrated by the painter [Esref Armagan] who was born blind and learned artistic techniques, including shading, perspective, and color representation, purely through practice and feedback from others. Also keep in mind that i'm not talking about some fancy vague definition of art consisting of abstract or interpretive styles, but discrete anatonmically correct representation.
As for sonifiers, and I don't suggest people rely solely on them as BrushTone also has Braille Display support and other features, is that while the overall resolution is limited, you can "zoom in" on segments of images for greater detail, the equivalent of focusing on a particular part of the image, which is equivalent to some aspects of limited visual perception. The vOICe also has a color filtering system that allows you to isolate a particular color and sonify only that to the exclusion of everything else, other tools like EyeMusic use different musical instruments interlaced to represent up to 5 colors simultaneously. The concept of shading is more of a perceptual interpretation of that information, the use of gradients and spacial reasoning. BrushTone comes with a few other features such as pixel RGB color representation via a series of pitch modulated tones, in addition to the ability to isolate the RGB layers or specify a specific color to sonify, and line scanning. Another advancement to that is Orbit Researches Graphiti, a literal tactile display monitor with variable height pins, habit feedback, touch display, and color support, Which would all be great if not for the sticker shock.
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