NYCPHP Meetup

[lists at nopersonal.info]

Ajai Khattri wrote:
> My experience has been that often designers dont think of developer's as 
> creative peers. Its a different kind of creativity and its not just laying 
> code in a pre-determined order - there are often many ways to accomplish 
> the same functionality. Coming up with an elegant and maintainable 
> architecture is also very important.

I agree 100%. For many designers--at least the ones I have met--any kind
of coding or programming is anathema. They see it as something dry &
tedious, restrictive, confusing, and totally alien in its intangibility.
I suppose that's partly because designers' creativity is by nature
visually oriented, whereas programming requires more of a... I'm not
sure what to call it... maybe creativity of logic?

Both disciplines have sets of rules, and the most creative in both camps
know how to break them in a way that leads to something new & better.
It's too bad that there's often so much misunderstanding and friction
between the two--it's sort of like beauty of form vs. beauty of
function. IMO, the best applications embody both by being so elegantly
designed (both visually & functionally) that they are nearly
invisible--i.e. they allow the end user to perform tasks without having
to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how things work.

Bev