On May 18, 2009, at 5:50 PM, Robert Hoekman Jr wrote:
Someone who is unlikely to be great at either, even if he was
previously
great at one or the other.
I mean no offense by that — there's just far too much to know in
either
niche to divide your time and still excel. It's hard enough doing
*one* of
those things well. Sure, there are people who can do both, but
they're rare,
and you there's not really any way to prove to yourself that you're
one of
them without a bunch of other people telling you that you are.
On May 22, 2009, at 9:00 AM, Robert Hoekman Jr wrote:
Look, I didn't make this up. I experienced it myself, and have
talked about
it with many other people — they've all agreed. If this wasn't the
case for
you folks that are objecting, well, then great — lucky you. But that
doesn't
mean you represent a trend. Fact is, most developers aren't great
developers. Most designers aren't great designers. It's extremely
rare to
find someone who is indeed great at both.
The main problem with these comments is that if you want to believe
it, then by all means, go ahead and do so. But when you state it in
the manner you did on the list, it shuts down possibilities for making
progress in the field. Worse, when you state it as you did on a list
that aims to help professionals with a new emerging career, I find it
irresponsible because the future is going to see a lot of progress
where people will have to start preparing for right now.
Whether someone becomes good or great at being a designer in the high-
tech field while also having advanced coding and development skills is
not the point. Whether it is hard to do is also not the point.
The point is: they have to try. If they are told they don't need them
or its not possible, then they won't try. If they don't try, they
won't grow.
And in this field, given the rapid rate of change, and now the rapid
rate of technology flattening to make interface development for
software, mobile and RIAs far more accessible for anyone with decent
scripting skills, let along coding skills, not trying is a career
death sentence as all the young designers coming out of school are
going to eat your lunch in the foreseeable future since many of them
have the desire, the drive and the energy to learn all this new cool
front-end coding stuff while still being designers who know a thing or
two about form, function, aesthetic, type, color, layout, take your
pick.
Folks on this list need to stop reacting poorly to things like
interaction designers need to know to draw or need to learn how to
code. All you'll wind up doing is giving someone else the opening they
need to put you out of a job.
For those of you that already know to write clean, standards compliant
markup, dive into jQuery (http://jquery.com/), learn a little JSON (http://www.json.org/
) and go download Titanium from Appcelerator (http://
appcelerator.org/). Seriously, the amount you can now create with HTML
+CSS+JS+Titanium (or MXML+FlashCSS+AS+Air if you must) for front-end
coding and prototyping is awesome.
It actually makes the job a thousand times more fun and rewarding if
you really must know.
--
Andrei Herasimchuk
Chief Design Officer, Involution Studios
innovating the digital world
e. and...@involutionstudios.com
c. +1 408 306 6422
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