Designers. Programmers. Right Brain. Left Brain

Back in January it was the new year and the Studio was booked solid, as it typically is over the winter holidays. There are a couple of my client’s major annual projects that usually fall in at this time of the year. Some of the workload is print, and some of it is Web Design. Got more print than web at that moment, but often is the other way around. However, despite that I got my start in Print Design, and generally prefer it, I am reasonably convinced that if I had not learned and expanded into Web Design, I would be starving to death. Either that, or driving a school bus or something.

Part of this is that the low end of Graphic Design has fallen out of the hands of Design Professionals. Many of the small simple projects that sustained solo freelancers, small studios and kids starting out are now easily, or with a bit of sweat, churned out in Microsoft Office. Things like basic business cards for the local drugstore, the little league flyer, the pizza place menu, no longer need a pro. Much of this work is being churned out of dead cheap (except for the INK) inkjet printers, or bought over the counter at Staples, Office Depot or online at vendors like Vistaprint. I touched on this topic from a slightly different angle in When do you need a Graphics Pro? back in ’09. At the next level, nothing is stopping any “civilian” from purchasing a mid-range computer system and Adobe Creative Suite and hanging out their shingle. Welcome to My world, suckers.But Web Design is still sufficiently technical and bewildering that for most folk, the process still requires the services of folk who have some idea of the intricacies. “Um. Heap big medicine. Need Medicine Man.” (Apologies to my Native American ancestors and kola, making a point. ) So for us Designers, if we want to stay relevant, and employed, the majority of us have to expand our services and skill sets into Web Design.

One of my observations over the years is that Web Design seems to be the bastard child of Graphic Design and Programming. What you face as a Designer is that you care about all those regular things, like layout, color, attractive and readable type, nice graphics and – and sometimes clients fail to get this – good content to dress up. But the underside, that clients don’t see, that Designers have to content with, is that there is a ever more code and backend to make all the pretty happen. And as the ‘Net and particularly the Web evolves, the demand for ever more increased sophistication grows. Clients see a complex web application on a huge corporate site, and say “I want that!”. But they don’t necessarily have the budget of a small Caribbean nation, and I am not a huge Madison Avenue agency with hundreds of designers, programmers and developers.

But programming in PHP, Perl, Javascript and JAVA, JQuery (yay!), Actionscript (kill it with fire) is a very much a Left Brain activity. Take it deeper, and get into the painful details of Server Administration and deeper languages like C++ interfacing with APIs, and you are well into the realm of the Coders. Design folk are notoriously Right Brain sorts of people, visual thinkers much more comfortable with a sketchpad than a calculator. Even HTML and CSS, now critical to maintainable web sites, can be challenging for visual thinkers. Poking about in PHP is getting better, and I’ve recently built a PHP based site that actually looks good and works well, since the owner often makes sweeping changes to the site. Using PHP modules, chaging out the menu takes 30 minutes, versus several hours of find and replace, and hand coding to fix the glitches.

It is very untypical to find individuals with comprehensive skills on both the Design and programming side in the same skull. Right Brain. Left Brain. If you chance upon some of these very rare humans, hire them, and pay them the princely fees they’re worth. What? Really? If you could go there you would, so stop whining and stick a crowbar into your wallet and pay up for teh m4d skillz.

But of course in the modern age, we make partnerships with those people who’s skill sets cover our gaps. The prevalence of CMS solutions such as the one you’re reading now, WordPress, and  technologies and services such as Blogspot, Tumblr, Joomla, Drupal, Squarepace, LightCMS, etc. etc., have provided ever more powerful and useful frameworks for Designers and Developers and even the ambitious Hobbyist or business person to get online and look pretty decent without having to reinvent the wheel every time. You may have noticed the Facelift. That did not entail rebuilding and recoding the blog from scratch, but rather Swapping in a new theme, and then modding the CSS code to suit my tastes.

However, some issues with the WP Updates, with the new security arrangements my web host put in place on our servers, did require me to fire up my Left Brain to untangle. At least I am using it for something a bit more ambitious than just keeping my gray hair warm.