Re: FN-FORUM Freelancer hourly charge rates

date posted 24th August 2000 14:31

on 24/8/2000 11:49 am, Peter McCormack at [EMAIL REMOVED] wrote:

> Quite an interesting debate between designers and programmers, I put it to
> you like this:
>
> Do you think Porsche, with their great engines would sell as many cars if
> they had a crap design? No course not, both are important, programmers
> should not design and designers should not programme and then we would have
> less problems!!!

Follow that argument to its conclusion and you'd soon find that nothing that
looks good would ever work and vice versa. That's a pretty extreme point of
view, and one likely to produce poor results. Next you'll be saying that
programming involves no creativity and art requires no technical ability.

Pretty much all design, whether technical or creative, comes down to a set
of constraints defining a solution space. A designer's job is to pick the
best point in the space and build an appropriate solution.
Appreciating what these constraints mean is a matter of knowledge and
experience, regardless of discipline - knowing about complimentary colours
is as relevant to a designer as referential integrity is to a database
programmer. Importantly, there is a great deal of crossover between all
disciplines - a designer with an understanding of compression can design
graphics that will compress better, and stay looking good. There's technical
stuff that's worth knowing for designers - for example, anyone that's using
sRGB colour space will be producing below-par results, and that means
EVERYONE that's using Photoshop 5.5 with default settings...

Designers with deep technical knowledge and technical types with creative
flair are rare people, and often produce amazing results.

We could get really cynical and say that all design is a form of engineering
- tuning your character spacing is not really much different to tuning your
SQL queries, though you may find that on an individual level, you are better
at one than the other. Personally, I will never stop learning about, and
attempting to understand (understanding is much more useful than knowledge),
everything that comes my way.

Marcus (techie with a Porsche!)
--
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Putting you in the picture

[EMAIL REMOVED] | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk