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What kind of Designer are you?

Keith has a sort-of poll on his site that asks what percentage you are of two opposing trends in web design. It’s sort of like one of those silly “What Dog food are you? What comic book character are you?” type things I guess, only this one is a bit more realistic and useful. Here are my answers:

Designer/Developer: 90% designer. I can read a little PHP and modify scripts a little, but I really have no interest in programming whatsoever.

Form/Function: 75% function. No point in having something be pretty if it doesn’t do anything. (aside from art, etc, which is all form) But at the same time, you could have the most functional site in the world, and if it’s butt ugly, people will most likely not utilize the site/thing to its full potential because it’s just so ugly or hard to use.

Front-End/Back-End: 75% front-end. This is basically the same as the first question, but in my own mind I include things like MovableType in the back-end category, and I do know a bit about MT and enjoy making it work. I just don’t like flat out programming or scripting.

Print/Web: 100% web. I don’t do any print stuff at all unless it’s my own business cards or something similar.

Web standards/Not-Web Standards: 75% web standards. I try to always do CSS layouts and make everything with standards, but I’m not a freak about validation. If the site doesn’t validate but still looks good in all the major browsers, I’ll probably not spend a ton of time making sure it validates.

Minimal/Lush: 95% minimal. This goes along with the second question a little bit. All of my designs are minimal. If it’s an e-commerce site it’s usually especially minimal, because I believe the site should focus on the product, not on the fancy graphics or animations. After all, that’s why the person is there, to buy something, not to be wowed by jpegs.

Content/Presentation: 65% content. Content is by far the most important, but presentation can have some effect on how that content is received. It can also make the content more or less trustworthy and/or interesting, depending on how it is presented.

CSS/Tables: 100% CSS is what I’d like to do, but real-world it’s probably more like 75%.

Flash/HTML: 100% HTML. I have never had a use for Flash and probably won’t any time soon. It’s great for games but I see little use for it in web sites, except as maybe an application of some sort where the Flash is tied in to a nice back-end. But I’ve only seen that done well a couple of times.

Hi Derek,

I am starting into doing web design with CSS positioning and love it, for the most part.

I also do some basic JavaScript etc…I am not a programmer and I noticed that you mentioned you really aren’t either. But I notice your site uses PHP and MT. How did you get into those and how did you make it all work? I guess what I am asking is, What is you exprience with PHP and MT and can you point me in the right direction? I want to create a more dynamic site and eventually have a blog.

Thanks!
-Timo

Timo,

MT is fairly easy to install as long as you carefully follow the directions, and the rest can be put together by editing the default templates that come with it and reading the documentation.

The only reason this site has a .PHP extension on the pages is so I can use PHP includes to insert blocks of code into the site using a single line of code. That’s all the PHP that is used on this site.