Large Heydon ColliderMost of the time, I get hired to fix things as a consultant developer that would not be broken if they had been designed more thoughtfully in the first place. Sound familiar? But here's the thing: I'm not a developer. I studied art and design at university, including how to design websites. But they didn't teach me how to code, even though that's most of the work. So, in early employment, I had to ""steal company time"" to learn how to do that and be better at my job, as a designer.
Recently, I've taken on design work that lets me work in code. One involved the ""redesign"" of a website. Being in this position allows me to improve the performance and accessibility of a website to an extent that is completely out of reach of a developer, who inherits *prior art*. And this is despite the fact that performance and accessibility are seen as responsibilities of *developers*.
James Scholes@heydon > Being in this position allows me to improve the performance and accessibility of a website to an extent that is completely out of reach of a developer, who inherits *prior art*.
I'm intrigued, but don't know what you mean by this.
@jscholes Let's just talk about accessibility for simplicity: Someone says to me, "can you make this carousel accessible?" And the answer is usually no, not this one, it's fucked. It's extremely difficult or impossible to make good of the component. As a designer, I would have the authority to remove the carousel altogether and put a completely different pattern in place. Or, as a designer who can code, I could devise a carousel-like alternative that is, in fact, accessible BY DESIGN.
Eric Eggert
Florens Verschelde@yatil @heydon @jscholes The opposition to factoring in accessibility and performance from some designers always felt strange to me. Can you imagine an industrial designer saying “who cares if our design choices double the production costs and lead to brittle products and massive recalls? this is our design vision”? (Or, sure, look at Musk and the Cybertruck if you don’t want a hypothetical.)