Firstly, apologies for not getting round to writing this earlier, I’ve been meaning to for ages but suddenly got busy… oops! Anyway, enough apologies, I’ll get on with it shall I!

I mentioned this on Twitter after I received an email from Charlotte about speaking at Geeky earlier this month. It was brilliant, it gave me all the information I needed to be prepared for the event. So here’s a quick run down of what she included and some other stuff I recently sent out to speakers at the event I’m organising with 12 Devs.

Tech

The main thing I think I always want to know is about the tech set up. I want to know what resolution I need to make my slides so they fit properly on the screen, there’s nothing worse than slides not fitting on a screen properly and having those horrid black lines at the top or sides. Next, I need to know what I’m going to be using to present on the night, whether I’m going to need to take my laptop with me or send the slides in early.

Software is also a factor, I’ve spoken twice recently at Ubelly events and both times they’ve asked me to create PowerPoint slides when I’m a Mac user. As long as I know this in advance I can work with it and try to provide them with good slides with fonts that will work on Windows.

The event

Tech is almost certainly the most important thing to know before the event, but it’s also good to know as much information about the event as possible. Even if I know the event already it’s good to have it written down for me to refer to just in case. Things like: - Where the event is, full address is nice. - When the event is, even if this should be obvious still nice to have a reminder - Timings for doors opening, talks starting and rough finishing time etc - The event format/running order for the night (I know this isn’t always possible but it’s good to know when I’ll be speaking)

Some other little bits that are quite good to know and things that I’ve sent out to speakers for the 12 Devs at Easter event coming up. These are just things like the rough attendance expected that night and whether or not the event will be recorded in some form or another. Although to be honest it was nice to not know in advance that the last Geeky was going to be live streamed that night, it meant I didn’t have chance to get nervous about it!

On the day/night

On the night (I always seem to be speaking at evening events at the moment), it’s good to know whether I can get there early and get a drink and have a bit of chance to relax before people show up. Another nice touch is getting a chance to test out my slides and get a feel for the stage/set up, I still get quite nervous so to know where I’m going to be standing and what I can see from where I am helps settle me a little!

Anything else?

Good communication on the run up to the event is always nice, just an email a week in advance and the night before was good enough to help remind me it was upcoming and that I actually needed to make sure I was ready etc. (maybe that says more about me than anything else).

And that’s about it to be honest. If there’s anything else anyone wants to add please tweet (I would say comment here but I don’t think I’ve set up comments on Octopress and well it’s taken me long enough to write this post so it’ll be even longer before there’s comments here!).

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing you at 12 Devs at Easter and if you’ve not already got a ticket add your name to the waiting list and we’ll let you know as soon as any become available.

I’m sat on the train heading back from what is likely the last ever New Adventures conference. As much as that makes me kinda sad to say that it might not happen again, it’s been a great few days and a truly great end to the first month of 2013.

New Adventures was one of the first conferences I attended when it ran for the first time back in 2011, I had been in the industry for about 15 months and hadn’t really found out much about the community around the web industry. I had attended FOWD2010 but that had been with the other developers at work and I hadn’t really met many people there, they were just people. New Adventures showed me there was a much bigger community around what we do and it made me want to be a part of it.

This year was no different. Except for me that instead of knowing almost no one, I knew a ridiculous amount of people, and met many more new folk as well. I think the extra events around the conference really help to promote this in the community and the Erskine bowling and the (abandoned) Fr00tball were some great opportunities to meet people and get to know the community.

The conference day itself was another fantastic success as well, I remember coming away from 2011 bursting with new ideas and things I wanted to do. This year is no different. The talks from Tiago Pedras and Jessica Hische gave me confidence that things I’m working on and the way I want to work are worthwhile and gave me the motivation to push on with them. Jason Santa Maria and Jon Tan’s talks make me think more about what I’m doing and how to approach new things. I remember seeing Jon’s talk from 2011 and being just as inspired.

Having Seb Lee-Delisle take the stage straight after lunch was a great decision, his enthusiasm and fun approach to his talks were brilliant to wake up the crowd after getting suitably full from lunch. I always enjoy watching Seb speak at events, I’ve seen him do similar talks 2 or 3 times in the last year or so and I’d happily watch him many times over.

Thanks to all the other speakers as well who did a great job, I don’t think I heard a single person say something bad about any of the talks with everyone taking away something different things from a variety of the talks. There’s few I really want to watch again especially Stephanie Troeth’s talk, when it’s up on Besquare, I really liked the idea behind the talk but need to hear it again as there was so much to take in!

Finally I just want to say thank you again to Simon and Greg and all those involved with the conference, thank you for the last few years hard work, I missed the second year which I wish I hadn’t but am so glad I made it back for the third! Thank you.

Right, so I guess it’s about time I started thinking about the WordPress workshop I had to postpone last year. Again sorry to anyone who had booked on it and sorry again for taking so long to arrange it, a lot has been going on over the last few months but I think I’m ready to start thinking what I want to do with the workshop now.

First of all I think it’s time for a new and better title which describes the day a bit more. The previous generic title of “The WordPress Workshop” led to a lot of questions about what the course would actually cover and what level of experience with WordPress was needed in advance. So the new title for the workshop will be:

WordPress for front-end developers

WordPress for front-end developers will cover using WordPress from the point of view that you’re a front-end coder (or designer with some front-end knowledge) and want to use WordPress to be able to deliver a better level of service to your clients, to offer them a “full-service” so to say. You will be required to have no prior knowledge of WordPress or backend coding in PHP, to find this workshop useful. I will be going into enough detail in the workshop that by the end of the day you should be confident enough to be able to develop your own custom themes for the CMS.

One day

I’m going to keep the workshop at a day-long for now, purely so that I can see how it goes and keep costs down for the first run. After the first one I will review what went well, less well and what could be included/left out for further runs. I’m toying with the idea of doing an advanced workshop or a two-day workshop should it work out well and the interest be there.

The day itself

On the day here’s the topics I will look to cover:

• Introduction to WordPress
• Installing WordPress (from the command line, including setting up permissions and simple configuration)
• Introduction to PHP and WordPress specific uses
• Starting a theme from scratch
• The Loop
• Template hierarchy
• Custom post types and taxonomies
• WordPress and theme security

I’ll stick roughly to this list at the moment and work on it from there, I think these are some of the more core topics that should get you up and running with building your own theme and getting to grips with backend development.

When?

As it’s very much still in the planning stages the when is very loose but I will hazard a guess at it being towards the end of April time. But I will release more information as and when I get things better set up.

Where do I sign up?

I’m writing this sat on the train on the way back from NAConf, so for the moment there’s no website or booking set up. For now if you would like to be kept up to date with developments you can sign up to the mailing list through the old site and I will be sending out information when I have a better idea of what’s going to happen next.

A while ago my boss sent round a link to a post from 37 Signals, An office with “library rules”, with the question, “I always wonder if this would be a good idea?”. At the time I wrote a quick response and afterwards thought I’d share it here, so this is my take on “Library rules/silence”.

A bit of background, in our room at the office we generally have music playing in the background to the entire room, people including myself wear headphones and listen to their own music, and we also have a lot of people coming and going like account managers and people from different parts of the office.

I don’t think “library silence” or rules like that would work to be honest, for one does that mean the music stops? Would that therefor mean we all resort to headphones?

There certainly are times when it gets loud in here for all the conversations that are going on, I’ve donned headphones a number of times because I literally can’t think for the noise… but how we deal with taking those conversations away from the people working is the hard thing. Meeting rooms for conversations I don’t think would work, the noise build up I’m talking about is from multiple conversations at the same time and are relatively short, so moving them would be even more of a disturbance for the people having the short conversation.

Then again things like some account managers impromptu meetings bringing 3-4 extra people in here crowding round a desk are a different beast entirely, things like that would be great to have cut out. Generally account managers do come and go causing interruptions now and then, but that’s not down to them entirely, it’s down to the whole process of client work, it is disruptive, but I guess then you could argue account managers are there to buffer that disruption and allow us the space/time to work…

So basically what I’m trying to say is, yes, it would be great to be more distraction free and reduce the unnecessary interruptions/noise, but doing that in here would take some work, cultivating not only a culture amongst our team but almost in the company as a whole - to a degree…

Late last year saw the release of the latest default theme offering from WordPress the next of the Twenty-somethings, TwentyTwelve.

In this post I’m going to take a quick look through what’s new in the latest default theme. What new features there are for content editors and what designers/developers can learn.

The first thing to mention however is that WordPress has now gone fully responsive! The WordPress blog calls TwentyTwelve “a thoughtfully crafted mobile-first layout”, the TwentyEleven theme did respond in size certainly, but TwentyTwelve is a much more considered execution.

New design

The new WordPress default theme has certainly put a lot more emphasis on a content-driven approach to design. It’s very minimalist with a lot of whitespace and clean/clear navigation both on desktop and a nice execution on mobile. The typography of the TwentyTwelve theme also adds to it with the fantastic Open Sans typeface served via Google Web Fonts.

WordPress is now seen as much more than just a blogging platform, this too is clearly echoed in the new theme - perhaps controversially so. There is now a new homepage template design, taking away the post listing and giving you the chance to use a custom page as your homepage with 2 widget areas.

Other features include the introduction of a full-width page template removing the sidebar where you choose, another example of the content-first nature of the theme. And post formats are now carried over to the single post pages where in TwentyEleven the formatting found in the post listing would be lost in the single page template.

New development techniques

The new TwentyTwelve theme also looks pretty different when you dig down into the code and see the various changes introduced. For starters the <head> declaration has come down from 44 lines of code in TwentyEleven to just 10 lines in TwentyTwelve, mainly by moving more functions into the functions.php. That also includes the main stylesheet call being applied with wp_enqueue_style():

// Code

/*
    * Loads our main stylesheet.
*/
wp_enqueue_style( 'twentytwelve-style', get_stylesheet_uri() );

Speaking of the stylesheet, lots of work has gone into making this a truly responsive theme and this can be seen no better than in the use of REMs in the stylesheet for all of the main sizing for the theme. Meaning the design will also respond well to adjustments made to the default text size.

As mentioned earlier there are 2 new page templates available in the TwentyTwelve theme, front-page.php and full-width.php which can be found in the page-templates folder. The front page template will get called if a custom home page has been used for the theme and pages will be styled the same as the full-width page template should the user remove all widgets from the main sidebar.

The new offering from WordPress in the TwentyTwelve theme clearly shows how well WordPress has evolved over the years to become one of the top content management systems on the web. There’s a reason over 56 million websites are powered by it. The new TwentyTwelve theme clearly shows that they are continuing to develop with the times and the industry.

So the past year has been pretty incredible/overwhelming/busy and everything in between really, so I thought I’d write a quick summary of all the stuff that’s gone on. Sorry if this seems an awfully long rambling post but I really just wanted somewhere to get down what actually happened last year and reflect on it personally really, so apologies if I go on a bit…

Here’s a quick summary of the things that have happened:

• Attended a bunch of conferences
• Began conference speaking
• Changed job
• Moved to London
• Started lecturing at Oxford Brookes
• Helped kick off CodeClub
• Struggled with Burnout
• Attempted the Tour de Trigs (a 24 hour 50 mile cross country hike)
• Organised another 12 Devs of Xmas

Conferences

This year for me has been a lot about conferences, learning, and meeting a heck of a lot of people! After having a look through my accumulated lanyards from the past year here’s the list of events I’ve attended:

• jQuery UK (Oxford)
• DIBI (Newcastle)
• Reasons to be Appy (London)
• Reasons to be Creative (Brighton)
• Points Brighton
• Web Developer Conference (Bristol)
• HandHeld Conference (Cardiff)
• Milton Keynes Geek Night (all three!)
• As well as many mini-events like Ubelly Ignite and some Mozilla events.

Looking back it’s a heck of a list! And I can’t say there was a single one that I felt did a bad job. Every single event was packed full of great talks, amazing speakers, and the opportunity to meet and chat to loads of great people in our industry.

Looking forward to this year I’ve actually decided to make a conscious decision to cut back a bit on the conference front, save up some money and look at doing different things. I’m finishing off my run of conferences later this month with New Adventures. I attended the first year of this amazing event and after missing out on the second year I had to get back the 3rd (and possibly final year). It won’t be my only conference of the year I’m sure, I’ll probably be looking to attend Build in the latter part of the year but for now I need a bit of a break.

Conference Speaking

I’ve been extremely fortunate this year to have been invited to speak at a few conferences. Whether to a room of just 20 or so people or in front of hundreds it’s been pretty incredible. Here’s the short list of the talks I’ve done this year:

• Milton Keynes Geek Night #1 - Code Club
• Ubelly Ignite - Code Club
• Reasons to be Creative - The Designer Developer Relationship
• Reasons to be Creative Ubelly Soapbox - Burnout
• Points Brighton - Burnout
• Milton Keynes Geek Night #3 - Misadventures with Burnout

So far most of these have been short 5 min talks, with the exception of Points where I was able to go on for about 15-20 minutes or so. By far the craziest one was Reasons to be Creative as part of the Gimme 5 slot! 12 people doing 5 minute slots each, back to back with absolutely no time for switch over! We went through 4 rehearsals and various stages of encouragement and advice from John Davey and the team at Reasons, it was crazy and to be honest not my best talk this year but it’s an experience I won’t ever forget.

The talk I’ve been most confident with so far is the Burnout talk, I’ve done this 3 times now and each time I’ve been able to improve it and improve my delivery as well which going by the video, it still needs a lot of improving.

New job

In August of this year I left the amazing team at One Ltd to find newer pastures. I felt it was time to move on and with a real pull towards moving to London I joined the web team at Big Fish as a Front-end Developer. I loved my 3 years at One, it was my first job coming from University, where I learned pretty much everything! They took a chance with me and I really appreciate that.

The move to Big Fish has so far been a great experience as well, working with some fantastic brands, learning a heck of a lot of stuff I had only just started to touch on at One and feeling well and truly like they have a great approach to working in an ever evolving industry.

Made the move to London

For the first few month’s of the new job at Big Fish I was commuting to London from Banbury every day. However I soon started to get very sick of the 6am starts and not getting home till 8.30pm! So after spending 6 weeks or so house sitting for a friend in South East London and moving my mum into my vacant flat in Banbury I was able to find a house share in central London just south of the river and only 20 minutes from work!

It took a little while but after a few months of unrest I’m now pretty much settled in London and so far really enjoying it. For one thing it’s enabled me to attend a ton more mini-events and meet a load of new people in the industry, so while I may not be attending many conferences this year I’m sure I’ll be plenty social at the various events that always crop up around town.

Lecturing at Brookes

As well as speaking at a few conferences this year I’ve also managed to do 2 lectures at Oxford Brookes about working in the web industry giving students a look at what they can look forward to should they decide to join our amazing industry. It’s been really rewarding so far and I’ve had some good feedback from the students and lecturer.

Having industry professionals go into Universities and talk to current students about current techniques and technology is something I feel very strongly about. With the constraints on academic institutes keeping the curriculum up to date can be a real struggle so it’s something I’m going to be working on a lot this year as well hopefully.

The 12 Devs of Xmas

The year closed off with the second coming of the 12 Devs of Xmas. We actually started discussing the site and asking authors back in the summer so it’s been worked on throughout most of the second half of 2012 but once again it was quite a long and at times stressful process. But that’s a whole other post entirely which I hope to get writing soon.

A heck of a year

Ok so I’m going to stop there as it’s starting to get a bit longer than I’d expected. There’s a few things I haven’t covered, like working with the amazing Linda Sandvik and Clare Sutcliffe on Code Club - and standing in for them on a couple of talks (sometimes at very short notice). Going to my first ever hack day, and training for and attempting the 24 hour 50 mile Tour de Trigs hike with Chris & Graham - unfortunately falling ill on the day and only managing a measly 16 miles.

To be honest I’m hoping 2013 is a lot quieter than last year, I’m going to settle into London and the new job a bit more hopefully and try to work on a lot more side projects I have kicking about the place.

Finally to all those I’ve met this year, thank you all for being superb and amazing people, I can’t imagine working in an industry without you guys!

I’m just starting to play with new technologies and techniques for blogging, the first two I’ve chosen are Octopress - this one - and Scriptogram. I’m yet to publish anything on Scriptogram but I’m thinking of putting content on there and here then seeing which is easiest to write to and manage over the coming months. My aim is to find something that makes writing easier and focuses me on that instead of putting a redesign ahead of creating content.

Others platforms I’m considering are ModX, Perch, and Statamic - the last two are paid for though so I’m not sure I’ll be trying out those for such a temporary solution.

I recently read a post by a friend, Richard Powell, You’re not an expert, but that’s ok. In which he says:

I often suggest that designers and developer run a workshop to share their knowledge only to hear: “I couldn’t give a workshop, I’m not an expert”

I can understand where people are coming from when they say that, I had very similar thoughts a while ago when I was thinking of running a WordPress workshop. However there is something I have found extremely useful when it comes to preparing a lecture, a talk and most certainly when working towards putting on a workshop. The best way to learn a subject and become an expert is by teaching it to someone else.

It reminds me of a quote in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams:

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. […] By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil.

Granted in context the quote is describing the art of programming, but I think it’s a great statement about teaching in general. To be able to explain something well to another person you need to truly understand it yourself. That being the case I would say that by running a workshop or giving a talk it will enable you to learn a subject so thoroughly that you might well consider yourself more of an expert afterwards than when you began.

So essentially what I’m saying is just what Richard is, go and put on workshops, it will be of benefit to you just as much as it will be to the people you will be teaching.

Over the last year or so my involvement in the web industry exploded; I began to look at my career as a love and much more than a job. I enjoyed working so much it was no longer constrained to 9-5, evenings and most weekends were spent doing what I loved, tapping away at code or reading books and blogs. I was having great fun and earning money, what more can you ask for in life.

In 1972 Herbert J. Freudenberger defined burnout as “a demon born of the society and times we live in and our ongoing struggle to invest our lives with meaning. It is not a condition that gets better by being ignored. Nor is it any kind of disgrace. On the contrary, it’s a problem born of good intentions.”

A few months ago I started losing the passion for my work, instead of spending weekends working I spent them trying to find things to get me away from it. I had reached the point where I had a lot of work, lots of free time and it was the last thing I wanted to do. I started concentrating on paying work only; I put off side projects and things that I had previously enjoyed doing. I felt like I was letting down friends, clients, and most of all myself.

Burnout can manifest itself in many ways. Your behaviour can change, becoming more aggressive, cynical and frustrated with things. You feel empty and apathetic towards your work. In worse cases it can lead to depression and what is known as burnout syndrome, causing mental breakdown, physical collapse and possible, suicidal thoughts. Luckily I can only relate to a couple of those.

Sitting here now I see what happened and try to work with it so I’m no longer as badly affected. I don’t feel nearly as bad as I once did. However this realisation didn’t come on it’s own; I read a post by Rob Hawkes about his first year at Mozilla. He spoke about how amazing it had been but also how hard the constant travel and work was, and how after a while he too felt the effects of burnout. I spoke with him briefly afterwards on Twitter and it was nice to have someone I could talk to that I could relate to and have an open conversation with.

Topics like this can be very personal, but affect more people than are willing to admit. By talking about it, I’m hoping others will realise it’s not just them, it’s common and it’s manageable.

I’ve been a web developer for a few years now, mainly working at an agency, but with some freelance experience too. Generally this has meant the projects I work on will usually be alongside a designer, a situation which I’m sure many people are familiar with. This designer/developer relationship will therefore form the basis of their work together and I believe to produce great work you need a great working relationship. For me personally it’s been a bit of a love/hate experience and I’d like to share some of those experiences here and look at how it can be made into a much more enjoyable partnership for both roles.

From my experiences I’m yet to work with many designers who know that much, if anything, about coding. And for the most part I’m terrible at designing! However I’m not here to say that designers should learn code and developers should learn to design… In my opinion it’s each to their own. If you want to learn another discipline that’s great and no doubt it will help with your work and your understanding of the wider picture. I’ve worked on teams though, where people are either out-and-out designers or developers and they are still extremely successful, in that situation it’s been because of a strong collaboration between the pair that makes the team successful. Unfortunately that’s not always the case and sometimes there can be disagreement, conflict and ill feelings towards one another. I’d like to look at how we can prevent things like that from happening and create a relationship which leads to great work and a good feeling between both designer and developer.

I love my job

Put simply, I love my job! I’m a terrible designer, but when given a flat design I can turn that into a masterpiece of code - well I like to think so anyway - and I really enjoy it. I think if I were to design as well as code I wouldn’t be able to produce anything close to what I do now working alongside a designer. Having someone to work alongside and bounce ideas off is fantastic, as great as it feels to produce a brilliant piece of individual work, there no feeling like working with someone, being inspired by their ideas and having them respond excitedly to something you’re done.

And I love the challenge! If I were to design things for myself I don’t think I would be able to generate freedom from the code, I would design things knowing that I could code them easily or similar to something I’ve already seen. With a designer who doesn’t work with code they’re not bound as much by those contraints, they can design something which they think will look and work great and be as creative in that process as possible and it’s my job to work out how to turn that into code, and that’s where I get to have fun.

The not so good bits, and how easy they are to fix

Although the designer/developer relationship can be amazing and lead to some fantastic results, there are some things that can interrupt that creative process and cause the relationship to sour. There may be times where a designer or developer - whether internally or openly - believes that their discipline is superior and should be considered more important in the process, which is absolute rubbish. But I think Cassie McDaniel put this a little more eloquently in her post on the subject “Copy, art, typography — and technology — are the bones of a project, where design and development are the joints and skin that connect and hold together the parts.”

So putting aside egos, there are some common circumstances which we may come across through the course of a working relationship that are going to cause issues in the final outcome and maybe damage the relationship for further projects. One positive I mentioned earlier, that designers who aren’t that knowledgeable about code are more free from the constraints a developer might feel, can sometimes be a downside too. At times designers I’ve worked with at least - I’m sure that it’s not just me - have sold concepts to a client which, that when it comes time to build aren’t as simple as the designer thought and have either been under-sold or not given the necessary time to complete. This can be easily solved simply by communication, just speaking to the developer about the proposed solution before the client is sold the concept can mean it can be adjusted to work better for the clients budget or the client can be made aware of possible extra time/money needed for a solution which is best suited to them.

Developers can also be a pain when they choose to speak in too much technical detail about what they want to do or are doing on a project. Learn to talk more human language, just because you know exactly what you mean, it doesn’t mean the everyone else will - including the designer who needs to understand. Explain things clearly and easily and you’ll have a much better chance of getting the idea accross or comments on the design understood so something can actually be done about it.

Both parties need to stay up to date as well, developments in the industry, new ideas, tools and techniques. I probably don’t have to tell that to people reading this post or who saw this talk because clearly you’re already doing that. But what about the others in your office, is the developer you work with here as well, or are they back in the office because they couldn’t afford to come or don’t think they gain that much from conferences. If that’s the case it’s then your job to go back to them with all of these new fantastic ideas that you’ve picked up and expose them to it. After Reasons to be Creative I’m planning on going back into the office and doing a short talk to tell people about what I’ve learned there so they can take away some of the things I have.

Work more closely as a team

The biggest issue I think I have though is when a designer/developer relationship just isn’t that at all, when it turns into a conveyor belt process where things are just handed on from one person to the next and people have no involvement in anything outside their own discipline. This isn’t just bad practice but it’s extremely detrimental to the working relationship and can lead to people feeling completely removed from the project as a whole, resenting the work, and other members of the team. The most effective way to solve this is to include everyone in the process right from the start, having developers in meetings earlier and even with the client can lead to better results and sometimes more creative ideas, as developers know how to bend the technology to solve certain problems, something a designer might not have the technical know-how for. Throughout the process as well I think it’s important that both the designer and developer remain in touch with each other, talking about what’s going on both in design and development, it means we have to make ourselves available to each other and to willingly engage at all stages of the project. If there are problems discuss them openly and don’t be snarky, learn to give better critique and how to take criticism openly.

Another possible solution is to look at your process as a whole, a lot of people are still working to a waterfall like process where maybe now we could be thinking more agile. Working closely together to produce something quickly and iteratively. With the move into a more responsive web as well this can only be a good thing, otherwise it could lead to designers producing multiple versions of each page design when a conversation with a developer or working to create it in the browser as soon as possible would be much more appropriate. For an example you could take a look at Andy Clarke’s recent case study of the agile process he used when rebuilding the new responsive ISO website.

Why should we bother

Now what I’ve said is great in theory of course, but it may mean a lot of work for some companies, breaking their current process or some might think, it’s all well and good but when you’re trying to earn money there’s time to worry about relationships. So let me just give you a few reasons why I think this is important.

Getting a developer involved earlier in the process and working more closely as a team throughout the project can lead to people feeling more compassion for the project. A developer understanding why a design decision has been made because they’ve been involved in the meetings with the client that explained them. Or the designer having a developer there to help with a possible solution to give them technical advice they need at the right time may help them avoid going back over the design again after they’ve already put a lot of work into it.

If you think of the designer/developer relationship in terms of the partnership between driver and co-driver in a rally team. Both have their own speciality, both would be useless without the other. If they don’t have a good working relationship, communicate well and use each other to do the best job possible they’re not going to win anything. They have their individual jobs to do and they prepare and work on them a little separately I’m sure, but when it comes to the race, they’re side by side working together to get the best time.

And if they don’t work well together, there’s inevitably going to be a crash at some point!

Hug it out

The relationship between designer and developer can be irritating at times, there can be bad feelings, poor communication or none at all. But without each other we wouldn’t be able to create the amazing, inspiring websites we do and have fun in the process. We work best as a team when we complement each other and work towards a similar goal, so before you go into your next project, find the developer/designer you’re working with, and hug it out!