JS Bournival

In response to Glen’s post, asking people what skills are on their « kung-fu » list, I would answer the following: Design, design, design.

Design as in UI

Beside using the wonderful Microsoft Paint, and cracking Photoshop for a quick job on a picture, I am the worst graphic designer in North America. I think Glen coined it very accurately: I definitely need to learn how to draw nice buttons, backgrounds, choose appropriate fonts, and pick nice colour schemes. Maybe learning a couple of tools will help.

Design as in usability

I’ve been reading a couple of books lately about web usability, namely the famous one from Nielsen, and the one from Steve Krug. Both were great, and they showed how lame I am in information architecture. As a developer, I’m more used to throw all the UI controllers in a page for the web integrator to arrange them in a nice way. But recently I’ve been thinking of redesigning my blog (other than using an existing WP template), and it hit right between the teeth: I am not good at this!

Design as in web page

Once I know how to layout things, I have to code the actual markup and style sheet. I am stuck at the first DIV tag I wrote: “Ok … now float uhhh … left??“. I think, for a true web application ninja, to know all these front end technologies is a big asset. I mean, you can’t just rely on libraries, and toolkits (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) without knowing what they’re doing. CSS, DOM scripting, XHTML and other stuff (a.k.a. the web standards) are very important these days. It’s not like in the old days of the emerging web when you could just write a few tables and there you have it, a nice website. You have to pay attention to things like separating the markup from the dynamic behaviour of the page, and make sure your site/application is accessible to people with disabilities. I currently have Zeldman’s book on my bedside table, I read a couple of months ago DOM scripting which is nice for javascript beginners, and I plan to attack some of Eric Meyer CSS stuff.

There you go. Sorry Glen I didn’t posted in your your comments, but it’s a bit long.

Check back later this summer for a complete redesign of my blog (maybe on Gravl?)

JS.