Dear Designers Love Developers

Editor's Notes

• #2: Common goal: make awesome websites
• #3: introduce self, company. talk about title: digestion of comps into a drupal design
• #4: A designer experience, a developer experience and a user experience are intrinsically linked. Though, they are not inversely linked. A good design experience won’t come from a poor user experience. Ultimately, if something can’t be built or used, then the design experience was not a good one. A good user experience won’t come from a frustrating development experience. Details and polished are lost, the frustrations are passed to the users. A good development experience won’t come from a frustrating design experience. It is a terrible fate to build something isn’t designed to be built.
• #5: The idea is that the more we ‘empathize’ with the other role, the easier our job will be. The more a designer knows about the implementation, the easier implementation will be. The more the developer knows about the design, the implementation will have more ‘quality’. The easier it is to build a quality site, the better experience a user will have.
• #6: When our jobs become easy, websites get built and users like them. Details are then thought of an polished because the 80% of site is built. Drupal and CMS are a prime example: since we don’t have to keep solving the User Login problem, then we can concentrate on doing interesting things with the users. Content same thing.
• #7: When I say easy, I don’t mean a website that is lacking functionality. Neither do I mean that the website doesn’t do anything interesting.
• #8: Easy is directed planned goal and solution oriented purposeful perhaps a long way off, but obvious how you are going to get there An easy to build website solves the same problem as a hard to build website.
• #10: The designer understand the designer must understand what is easy and what is hard. If you don’t know, ask them. Collaborate with the developer, to better understand how it will be implemented. A beautiful looking design is not worth anything if it can’t be implemented. A beautiful design won’t be well-built if it’s not easy to build. Secondly, a beautiful design won’t be built if it’s not understood. Understand what the designer had in their mind. What the workflow is supposed to be. What interactive elements are present on the page. If new needs arise have your designer take a pass so that they can be fit visually and experientially within the site. A design can be corrupted if it doesn’t visually fit with the rest of the site
• #11: It’s cliche, but the two parts of this process need to be on the same page. You need to know the what and whys. Your common goal is a mind blowingly great website. Implementation is a key of making a website. A beautiful design is not beautiful if it doesn’t function. Related, a website can only be beautiful if it exists. Websites are hard enough to build. Let’s make it easy enough so that the project will be completed.
• #12: Reusing code speeds up development Abstracting and Generalization code is easy when it is planned and thought out. and leads to our goal
• #13: Now every project is different, but these are generally solved problems. Plugins or modules we can use and customize for our projects
• #14: Content is at the heart of any website. This is drupal’s job. Creating dynamic lists of content, relating it in different ways, is easy. It gets hard when things are added later. Having things set is good.
• #15: These are for free. For most administrative needs, it works. Notice the add another item which gives the user an option to add more files
• #16: It’s not always entirely straight forward and easy, but the form & form elements can be taken a hold of to surprising degrees. Javascript can be added. The amount of customization is very dependent, talk to your developer
• #17: Collapsing fieldsets come for free
• #18: Collapsing fieldsets come for free
• #19: dmitri’s vertical tab module can make those look like. An example of forethought and generalization of code. Lever
• #20: Views has powerful built in tools to give your users control. Views Bulk Operations allow you to perform an action on many nodes at once. Great for admin UI. Filters can narrow down lists of content. In this case you could narrow down by node type, content keywords or the authors users name. Views also has ajax paging and filtering built in. This can be a great tool for admin interfaces and such. But beware of deep linking (can’t send a URL, google can’t index, etc) Don’t over do it either.
• #21: These relate the menu structure in Drupal. Using them in design allows a developer to create a consistent URL structure.
• #22: Combining these things cck, panels, views you can create a really nice custom administrative UI easily. Total_control gives you a jump start.
• #23: Better UI for free tagging. Install module, configure. Bam.
• #24: Setting arbitrary weight values is hard, confusing and tedious. Leverage core drag and drop to have a better UI that is easier. Several modules leverage this
• #26: Thickbox, jQuery dialogue, light box, colorbox, many many are outthere.
• #30: Now every project is different, but these are generally solved problems. Plugins or modules we can use and customize for our projects
• #32: One client wanted to have one node appear in two seperate sections of the site, one registered, one forward facing. They did not want to edit things twice. Very reasonable request. Since drupal is good at content, it would appear that drupal should be able to do this. It turned out not so straight forward (node/panels, changing content, etc) Number of ways to do this, but we decided on a more robust system that could alias any node or panel.
• #33: One client wanted to have one node appear in two seperate sections of the site, one registered, one forward facing. They did not want to edit things twice. Very reasonable request. Since drupal is good at content, it would appear that drupal should be able to do this. It turned out not so straight forward (node/panels, changing content, etc) Number of ways to do this, but we decided on a more robust system that could alias any node or panel.
• #34: Hard problems are worth it. But they take time. Too many hard problems can overload development and cause many problems. Instead of getting the 80% of site working, you concentrate on the 20%. Client usually find these to be critical to their web application or site. they LOVE em.
• #35: I can’t go through a list of hard things because they don’t exist. If i could show them to you, very likely they would be ‘easy’ and solved. They take time to visualize, they take time understand,
• #36: I can’t go through a list of hard things because they don’t exist. If i could show them to you, very likely they would be ‘easy’ and solved. They take time to visualize, they take time understand,
• #37: introduce self, company. talk about title: digestion of comps into a drupal design