There is an apocryphal story about a management committee meeting with three items on the agenda: design a power plant, build a bike shed for employee use, supply refreshments for the Welfare Committee. The story goes that the first item was approved in a few minutes. The second item turned into a forty-minute discussion about what color the shed should be and who should get to use it. The third item it was decided, after deliberation, did not have enough information to make a decision, so it was added to the next planned meeting’s agenda. The vast majority of the time in the meeting was spent on the least consequential of the agenda items. This is bike-shedding.

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“User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers and other stakeholders focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process” – Interaction Design Foundation

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A couple of months ago, The Pragmatic Programmers announced a new book. Web Design for Developers is described as,

how to make your web-based application look professionally designed. We’ll help you learn how to pick the right colors and fonts, avoid costly interface and accessibility mistakes—your application will really come alive. We’ll also walk you through some common Photoshop and CSS techniques and work through a web site redesign, taking a new design from concept all the way to implementation.

My question is this. Should a developer be trusted with design? It is definitely a profitable skill to have. I believe that developers should at least have a basic idea of what goes into design. I also believe that designers should have a basic understanding of web development. However, if someone is at one end of the spectrum or the other, how do they acquire the necessary skills?

There are several books written for each audience, but very few that are targeted at both. To my knowledge, this is the first book attempting to make a developer more capable as a designer. It appears to approach design in much the way a “logically driven”, coding brain works. It breaks down the fundamental components of design. Layout, color theory, spacing, mockups, etc. All are laid out with a logical process. In some ways it only scratches the surface. Entire books are written on color theory, or typography alone.
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A couple of months ago, when ruby on rails 2.0 came out, I started a project to see if things had really changed all that much. I wanted something that was easy, but useful to me. At work, we had been discussing the pressing need for an easy to use listing of lunch places around our area. So, I decided, not only would I pick up rails 2.0, but I would see how hard it was to do a google maps mashup. Well, after a few days, I had the basics of a site up and running. Then of course, work got busy busy. (Something about launching our new website at work.) Well, in order to start benefiting from at least some of my effort, I spent the last weekend getting everything set up to deploy to my server, so without further ado, I present Lunchspot! Now, I wouldn’t call this a completed effort. In fact, it is only a faint echo of what I had hoped to have going by this time.

So why release it now? Well, because it is still quite useful. You can already submit your favorite lunch spots, comment on them, and see where they are on the map. Soon, I’ll have directions, ratings, sample menus, and “send to a friend” links. But the biggest reason to put it up, and then post about it, is to remind me to work on it, and solicit any help on things like design/layout and graphics (two of my weak areas).

So what is for lunch anyway?