On Dec 19, 2007, at 1:40 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote:
> Let me put it this way: When I was working InDesign ten years ago
> (wow.. its been that long), I was managing the next versions of
> Photoshop and Illustrator at the same I was doing the design work on
> InDesign. The team was in Seattle, so I had to literally wake up at
> 5am every Tuesday, drive to San Jose Int'l Airport, catch a 6:30am
> flight to Seattle, drive to the office in downtown Seattle and get to
> work at around 9:30am. I worked all day, caught the evening 8:30pm
> flight back home and got back home around 11pm, only to have to do
> more work on stuff I missed that day. I did this every week for
> almost nine months straight.
>
> When I was there, we'd often have a 3pm review meeting, where... I
> kid you not... there were 9 to 12 people in a room to review the
> design work. Product managers, QA, engineers, even tech support
> folks. The purpose of the meeting was to do nothing but provide
> "feedback" on the design work I was doing. So basically, it was 9 to
> 12 people all giving me their opinions and I had to sit there and
> listen to them. Week after week. Needless to say, it got a little
> much for me to deal with, especially when their opinions or ideas
> went counter to the longer term design strategy I was implementing to
> make the Creative Suite possible.
>
> I don't care if people have opinions or evaluations of my work.
> Everyone has an opinion and part of the job being a designer is to
> deal with it, but it doesn't make us happy campers when its not done
> in a way that supports designers and their work. What I need are
> people who can not only give me feedback, but feedback I can actually
> do something with, or ideas that can be implemented or meet the same
> design constraints I have to use in designing the solution.
Not that I'm saying there was any failure on your part in this,
Andrei, but it sounds to me like there was a definite lack of "being
on the same page" here, maybe in both directions. You had design
initiative and cross-Suite consistency and a big picture view, while
they were likely focused just on InDesign, and often more tightly than
that, on individual features with little view beyond their current
arena.
(He says, having worked on other Adobe Creative Suite projects and
been on the opposite side of the table in evaluation meetings. And
having seen exactly that frustration from the designers, and having
felt exactly the flip-side of your frustration in the designers
seeming to be All Big Picture/Nothing Smaller when Smaller is what we
thought we needed at the time.)
Maybe this is nothing more than one of the eternal communication
issues, where proper framing of the discussion and pre-discussion
education needs to occur (or is just ignored in favor of other
agendas). But maybe there are other answers, too, like anticipating
the behaviors that are apt to happen. (Those described being little
different than what I've seen elsewhere, so I don't think there was
anything unique to InDesign.)
-- Jim Drew
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