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Some kind of monster
I've been trying to make myself sketch a lot more recently. This was mostly prompted by my decision to start up The Angry Robot Zombie Factory as an actual company doing web development and illustration.
I've been keeping an almost daily sketch blog over on tumblr and promoting any good pieces over onto my actual illustration portfolio. At some point, I'll bring all these different sites and things together. Until then, here's a sketch of a few things from the last couple of weeks.
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Synchronised Podcasts
This must exist somewhere. I just can't find it.
I listen to a lot of podcasts in a week and I use quite a few different computers. One desktop at home, one laptop while out and about and a PC and an iMac at work. I want some service (or combination of web service and application) that I can use to manage my podcast subscriptions regarless of where I am.
At the moment, I have iTunes installed on my desktop, my laptop and the iMac at work and I have subscribed to my collection of podcasts in each of them. I want to be able to plug in my iPod and have it delete the podcasts I've listened to and get the latest episodes of each of my subscriptions. At the moment, I plug it into the desktop, copy on the latest 'Planet Money' and listen. A couple of days later, there's another episode released so I plug into my laptop and it offers the episode I've just finished listening to and the new one. A few days later, I'm working on the office iMac and plug in my iPod, it suggests the last weeks-worth of episodes. I have to manually go into every subscription and drag over the individual files that I want to listen to.
What I'd like to have is a web site where I can put in my podcast subscriptions and it will track the latest episodes of each. I can then either point iTunes to this site so that I can point all my installations at it or it will provide an application which can be used to put the latest episodes onto my iPod. When I plug in my iPod, the application tells the site which ones I've listened to and it removes them from my listening queue. The application could, also be stored on the iPod itself to enable it to be used wherever the iPod is plugged in, not just on computers with iTunes.
Am I explaining myself clearly enough? It just seems so simple, it should already exists within iTunes. It is entirely possible that Apple's recent acquisition of Lala could be the first step in an online iTunes which would solve these problems. If anyone has any suggestions for the best way to achieve this, please let me know. I thought of a way of doing it with Dropbox but it would only work if the music bit of my iTunes library weren't bigger than my Dropbox account.
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Still Life Under Ice
I like the textures in this one but I might prefer it black & white. Hmmm.. undecided.
Originally uploaded by thingsinjars on flickr
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Appreciate the artisans
I know that every professional thinks their bit of the process is more important than people give them credit for. Designer's don't just colour in wireframes handed to them by the Information Architect. IAs don't just draw boxes and arrows. Copy writers don't just copy-and-paste the company brochure over the lorem ipsum.
Now that I've said that, I must now point out: Developers don't get nearly enough credit.
This may be something to do with the odd confusion that is 'web designer vs. web developer'. In some - and possibly the majority of - agencies, the web designer not only designs what the page looks like in Photoshop/Fireworks/Whatever but also produces the HTML templates, CSS and whatever JavaScript they feel comfortable with (the tutorials at jQuery for Designers probably help, too). In these agencies, if there is such a person as a web developer, they are most likely responsible for moving the relevant bits of HTML into template files, adding in any back-end integration and possibly writing some of the trickier JavaScript. The confusion arises in the other kind of agencies. The kind where web designers make Photoshop files and web developers turn them into HTML. The designer doesn't necessarily need to know anything about HTML, semantics or scripting. Not to minimise the importance of this kind of designer - they'll know a lot about typography, and visual relations, probably quite a lot about user experience and the process involved in bridging the gap between what the client wants to say and how the user wants to hear - but it's this kind of web developer I think doesn't get enough credit.
If you're designing a site with a full knowledge of how it could be marked up, you will naturally - even if it's subconsciously - be marking it up in your head. This will influence your design and not necessarily in a bad way. You might ensure the semantics are just that little bit clearer or you might nudge these bits over that way so they can be grouped with those other ones there. If, however, you design with no thought at all about how this is going to be made, you will, most likely, do some things that you wouldn't otherwise. If your front-end developer can take this and turn it into a perfectly semantic, clean-coded masterpiece of HTML and CSS then apply JavaScript to progressively enhance the heck out of it and still keep it looking like you designed, they deserve to be lauded, applauded, praised and thanked. Publicly. The usual outcome of this situation is that the designer gets asked along to the awards ceremonies, puts it on their portfolio, an article in the Drum, happy. The developer gets a pat on the back from the team leader and asked if they could just tidy up how it looks in IE5.5 before they head home for the night, that'd be great, thanks.
Sure, maybe we just need some better awards ceremonies for geeks. The kind of thing that the agency sales team will be able to brag about to potential customers (as that, in essence, seems to be the point of awards ceremonies) but I also think there might need to be a bit of a change of opinion in the industry. Just as designers don't just colour in wireframes, developers don't just open the designs in Photoshop and press 'Save for web...'.
I hope this doesn't sound too ranty. These thoughts were prompted after seeing a few designer and copy writer portfolios which contained sites that either I'd built or one of my team had built. Writers credited, designers credited, developers (who built some awesome stuff on them, by the way) lost in the mists of time.
