how to find your perfect designer

Occasionally you come across posts telling you exactly how to do your job. They are not always written with you in mind, but they are still highly relevant.

I just read a post of that description by Bèr Kessels
titled Good CMS (Drupal) designers are rare: ten [sic] points on how to find your perfect designer.

The Six Points

I'll run through the points to make sure I'm up to scratch:

1. Parallel discussion:

Don't just talk to a designer. Define the concept and goal. Then talk to the developers, designers and consultants together.

Well, I can't really choose who a client talks to in order to implement a team unless I'm put in charge. But what I do understand is how a broad range of jobs come together in order to create a successful project. If you don't manage each job properly, you are going to create a mess.

Since I'm the every-man -- I know a lot about a lot of things, but I'm not the best at any of them -- I fit well into small projects where it is just me collaborating with the client. If I have a speciality it is usability and the customer experience, which combines so many of these areas.

2. Never overestimate looks

Every successful site is ugly

My view is that if a site is ugly it probably has some usability problems. But ugliness really only shows up the smaller usability problems. Those successful ugly sites, get 95% of everything else right and that really matters. Pretty sites that get no traffic get the 5% right.

I'm aiming for 100%. But if I don't hit it (and I won't), 95% is not bad.

3. Ask for style guides

Static pages are not what you get when you implement the final site. A CMS is dynamic and you've got to deal with those dynamic items in the design.

As soon as I started working with Drupal I realised that a design that looks good when it is static is not yet complete. As soon as you take that static HTML and make it a Drupal theme, you suddenly have a whole bunch of issues such as login screens, warnings and other messages, extra buttons and forms, extra menu items...

These are difficult to deal with, but it is the job of the designer to sort them out.

I think it is important to not over-plan these areas though. Concentrate on the big stuff that is hard to tweak, and iron out the creases later.

4. Multi-talented

Developers and designers need to coordinate. It pays to understand each other's jobs

I'm not the best designer in the world precisely because I try to know lots about lots of things. But while I may not be able to create the most beautiful sites, I know how they work as a whole and I believe this is more important.

We are not painting pictures. The web is interactive, not something we hang in a gallery.

This means a designer on the web has to be different to a print designer. You can draw a distinction between skinning a site, and creating the whole user experience. You can do a lot with CSS and Photoshop, but once you get beyond a simple brochure site you need to start thinking about being a bit of a code monkey too.

Of course the bigger the team you are in, the more you have the chance to specialise, but it still pays to understand each other's jobs.

I may not be the best coder nor the best designer, but I AM happy in both environments... and more areas beside. I understand user experience, and I have solid ideas on how to improve it.

5. Think in Models, Views and Controllers

The designer is only creating the 'views' part of the site. Implementing extra functionality is the work of the whole team

Since I'm currently working on smaller one person projects, it is much more of my responsibility to add the functionality. But I'm not really the whole team. The whole team includes the client.

6. Ask about CSS, JS, standards and XHTML

I'm currently weak on Javascript and it is certainly something I need to work on. The other areas, I know. Add PHP to the list as well, because I know that better than Javascript.

Good designers are rare

The bad news for me is that to be a good designer I've really got to know a hell of a lot. When I decided that developing for Drupal would be a good career choice I thought I had most of the skills I needed. How wrong I was.

The learning curve is steep even to become good.

To become great is going to be incredibly hard.

The good news is that once I get there, I should have lots of work!