{"id":23768,"date":"2012-05-01T03:37:29","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T03:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/tedfromtheinternet-brian-lucid-what-is\/"},"modified":"2012-05-01T03:37:29","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T03:37:29","slug":"tedfromtheinternet-brian-lucid-what-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/tedfromtheinternet-brian-lucid-what-is\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tedfromtheinternet.tumblr.com\/post\/22171740453\/brian-lucid-what-is-front-end-design\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">tedfromtheinternet<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/brianlucid.tumblr.com\/post\/22121209289\/what-is-front-end-design\">Brian Lucid: What Is Front-End Design?  <\/a><\/p>\n<p>I really don&rsquo;t mean to be all bloggy, but I need to write this, because it&rsquo;s bothering me.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/brianlucid.tumblr.com\/post\/22121209289\/what-is-front-end-design\">brianlucid<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Front-End Design is a specific term that describes a set of competencies for individuals who work at the intersection of traditional front-end engineering and user interface (UI) design. A strong front-end designer should be able to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Understand, critique, and help improve a basic interaction&hellip;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I want to critique two points in here that seem to me to be at odds with each other. However, Tumblr truncated the original post, so I&rsquo;m going to be angry about that for a minute.<\/p>\n<p>Erm. So.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Create pixel-perfect page structures through front-end markup\u00a0code.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Ok, good, but what if, during the markup process, you find a condition that the designer didn&rsquo;t account for? \u00a0Obviously, you talk to them like a person, but too often that step is ignored for the sake of &ldquo;well, it&rsquo;s in the comp, so I&rsquo;m gonna code it up regardless&rdquo; and the overall project suffers. Be a person. Ask questions, and question assumptions. Simple designer omissions and oversights can really fuck things up for a developer (said somebody who&rsquo;s fucked up other\u00a0developers\u00a0with an oversight in a comp, and as somebody who&rsquo;s been fucked up by a designer forgetting something important).<\/p>\n<p>Pixel-perfection is fine and all, but it&rsquo;s at odds with this:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Keep track of emerging technological trends, understand their impact from a design perspective, and educate designers to empower them to design for the greatest, most up-to-date user experience possible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Great! I&rsquo;m all in favor of that. Let&rsquo;s keep making the internet better. Beautiful.<\/p>\n<p>And you know what&rsquo;s emerging as the New Thing That Websites Should Really Do <strong><em>Because Analytics Say So<\/em><\/strong>?<\/p>\n<p>Responsive design.<\/p>\n<p>It&rsquo;s difficult (pronounced: time consuming, expensive, and requires actual work) to comp out *exact* pixel-perfect comps for every single display resolution and device. We usually plan out a mobile, tablet, and desktop flavors of a site design, and\u00a0experiment\u00a0and iterate as we code. Coding is part of the design process, and &ldquo;design&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t stop when the designer hits send on an email with the PSD file in it.<\/p>\n<p>When you&rsquo;re building a site with responsive design techniques, there&rsquo;s so much variation that the old-school idea of quote-unquote &ldquo;pixel perfection&rdquo; simply can&rsquo;t deal with. The idea of using variable widths (and breaking floats and scalable images and blah blah blah) is directly at odds with the classical idea of &ldquo;pixel perfection.&rdquo; So don&rsquo;t strive for it, because it&rsquo;ll just lead to needless frustration and the work will suffer.<\/p>\n<p>So, in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1KiCEJoX9kE\">spirit of George Carlin<\/a>, here&rsquo;s my revised list:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Build a close relationship between designers and developers, so mistakes are caught, oversights are attended to, and iterations are natural, expected, and productive.<\/li>\n<li>Comp, code, test, repeat. Change resolutions and change devices. Then comp, code, test, and repeat.<\/li>\n<li>Understand why a product behaves the way it does.<\/li>\n<li>Keep track of emerging technological trends, understand their impact, and use them intelligently when &ndash; and only when &ndash; it helps solve a specific problem or reach a particular design goal.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>tedfromtheinternet: Brian Lucid: What Is Front-End Design? I really don&rsquo;t mean to be all bloggy, but I need to write this, because it&rsquo;s bothering me. brianlucid: Front-End Design is a specific term that describes a set of competencies for individuals who work at the intersection of traditional front-end engineering and user interface (UI) design. A [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-6bm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}