0 Why Designers Don't Get Programming
After much tussling around with my website today, I realized something. Designers just don’t get programming. Designers deal mostly with singular objects that may have related parts. Programmers deal with a mess of unrelated and related pieces.
Programming takes on a completely different thought process obviously, but it some cases it’s not that different from design. Programming simply deals with single pieces on an increased granular level. For example if I have an object, other objects may or may not have the ability to use or relate to it. This can be translated into design as well. Negative space and shapes all have some relationship to each other. You can’t have white space without it effecting the surrounding shapes and vice versa. In design we must also understand limitations and constraints provided by negative space and shapes. Example is a circle will solve problems that a square never will, but attach them to each other and you solve and well as birth new problems. So where is all this analogue talk going?
Like Patterns
Whenever starting a design I first gather resources, basically things that I absolutely need to get off on the right foot. After that I sketch some very rough mockups. During that time I fire up photoshop and usually work back in forth between prototyping and sketching. After a while sketches lose their value and it becomes all about the mockup process in photoshop. Sketches in a lot of ways act as scaffolding for design. They’re not meant to look pretty. Once mockups are likable, I begin porting/slicing down into valid XHTML/CSS.
In programming the process is almost exactly the same with the exception of the tools and said canvas. You’ll notice that in web programming especially, code libraries, snippets are gathered as to see what might be of good use. At this point you start building solid data models and structure. No real code written just yet. When modeling your data, you’ll notice that things are very basic and probably won’t stay the same. Seeing the 1-to-1 relation yet? Once you have your basic data models in place, its time to start really pulling down the code-base.
I could go on but …
The point is that patterns between two disciplines will always remain. You just gotta know how to map your patience and your thought processes to the right objects. Learning how to code on the back-end doesn’t come over-night and it certainly doesn’t come in a month. It takes time, diligence and patience to really understand how programming works. 70% of the battle is patience. Chew on that.