Ryan Singer: UI design on Rails
Posted by Annalisa Afeltra in
Design -
Ruby on Rails -
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How to break down the wall that has always divided developers and designers? Ryan Singer has the solution.
There exists a wall between the design and the development, in reality this is false perception deriving from the wrong assumption that the designer must create the graphics for an application. The designer must have a profound understanding of the product and can in theory shape and describe it.
The process that Ryan foresees is that the designer can, actually must operate at modifying the structure and the functionality of the application. The designer must also have the base knowledge of code that the application has been written in.
To give the designer other than the knowledge that he needs, an incremental learning approach, from this point of view the discussion simplifies in how much the designer in reality already know very simple programming languages (HTML, CSS…) from that they can derive the base concept of which is needed.
The first step is to have the understanding of the views, then the controllers and in the end the models (but this is not essential for the work of a designer).
If they can get to this level of mutual understanding it opens up another channel where the designer and the developer can communicate. In an ideal vision the designer is responsible for the views while the developer concentrates on the models and the controllers.
Ryan is know presenting a fraction of a controller from basecamp that he uses as an example to show the cooperation at the code level between the designer and the developer that is the only way to have satisfactory results.
Ryan concludes explaining how the designer can benefit from some architecture utilized from the developer. Like for example REST through which it is possible to define a base schema to access a resource.
Annalisa
