Re: Designers (was: Re: new calendar idea for gnome-shell)

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Federico Mena Quintero
<federico gnome org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-03-25 at 13:17 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
>
>> Thanks for that, I feel uncomfortable when people on this mailing
>> lists think there is some cabal of designers on an ivory tower
>> drinking ambrosia and sniffing glue.
>
> Even though there isn't an iron-fisted cabal of designers, we *do* have
> an anti-pattern of wanting to leave every visual decision to (visual)
> designers.  This makes people feel powerless, as they think they are not
> allowed to make decisions or even suggestions; and it makes designers
> feel stressed, as it seems that everyone wants to get their input on
> every little thing.
>
> My point with the blog post I linked to is that anyone *can* learn
> design easily, just by dedicating some time to it, and by starting from
> some rules of thumb and doing things empirically.

And, I might add, starting with some humility- knowing what you don't
know. In my past experience that was the biggest stumbling block for
new wannabe designers- they thought design was easy and so didn't
approach learning about it the way they might approach learning about
code. Once you realize it is hard, and internalize that, then the rest
becomes easy- you approach designers with the right amount of healthy
respect; you realize you need to learn; etc.

Luis