I’ve recently been involved in another business, no need to name names. From my experience with work there, I’ve decided to recount some of the lessons learned in terms of business decisions I thought were handled badly by one of the owners. This thread is not meant to be negative in any sort of way, it’s just sharing what I’ve learned. So here goes:
Bad Business Decision #1: Being a backseat designer. I’ve stolen this one from Seth Godin’s post: How to live happily with a great designer. Essentially what this means is that if you want to be a part of the process of design, you need to have some experience in design. You need to be able to provide valuable feedback. Otherwise, you are simply setting up roadblocks for your designer. Seth says it best: “You don’t know a lot about accounting so you don’t backseat drive your accountant. You hired a great designer, please don’t backseat drive here, either.” Marketing experience does not mean design experience.
July 26th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
In my experience, designers seem so flippant about their developers (”we want to code this in all AJAX!” or “Could we use CSS here?” or “I hear Javascript can do that!”) yet we are all a bunch of heathens when we comment on your inaccessible, non web standards based, living in the print world past, non scalable, loaded with the latest trendy widgets design? The one where gutters are always 11 or 12 pixels, never just 10, where borders fragment and gradiate (”you can’t do that in Java or something? I hear Java is good:), where the width is always fixed (”what do you mean which are the fixed columns and which are the liquid? I dunno - use PHP to figure it out. A friend told me PHP is really good.”).
Give me a break. 9.9 out of 10 web designers are worthless and NEED their designs commented on. Harshly. Rigorously.
July 26th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
HDawg - Like I said, “you need to be able to provide valuable feedback.” It can be harsh and it can be rigorous, but in order for it to be valuable, you need to know what you are talking about. In my personal experience, developers can make some of the best web designers out there. Simply because a good designer knows his medium. And who knows the web medium better (and inside out) than a programmer?
Constructive feedback = valuable.
Backseat designing = corrosive.
August 7th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
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