When I first learned to program computers, each project was a small task oriented towards teaching a specific concept, while building on the concepts that I already had learned. Small projects each solved a single problem or puzzle that you could only use the computer to accomplish.

Project Euler reminds me a bit of this type of individual puzzle, but it's lacking one essential element for learning: Passion. That's not to say the puzzles aren't interesting, and perhaps this is more a factor of my interests today as opposed to what they may have been when I was 8, but after solving a few of them, the novelty wears off a bit. They're not really solving any critical or fundamental life problem, and my interest in doing heavily computational math wanes in proportion to the number of every day problems I feel like I could be solving.

This ties in a bit with my graphic design for web developers idea. What would be ideal is a series of small projects that would be worthwhile to complete. Maybe a CV site? Maybe a redesign of my blog sites? These things would be useful and educational.

Berta and I were talking a bit when she got home from work today about how it would be neat to team up with a designer and spew out great new web sites. I mentioned to her how with many of the designers I've worked with, you get about 5 designs in, and then the designs start to look the same, or there's a style between them that's very similar, then making the sites look very similar themselves.

To me, that was a clue to switch designers every few projects, just to keep things fresh. To her, it was a clue that a developer could clutch a design theme and run with it and get away with doing design too, an insight I hadn't had before. And this all got me thinking about how many times I've urged web designer friends to produce some kind of post or video or course that explains the basics of design to developers. But nobody has stepped up.

So it's a new idea, and writing about anything instead of doing it is the kiss of death to any good idea, but I've been thinking about publishing a self-taught design blog, from the perspective of a developer, learning as I go. I would expect not to proclaim any expertise at it as I learn, but I'd have certain goals so that by the end I'd hope to 1) have a rudimentary process for producing my own web designs and 2) be able to give adequate instruction to other developers to get to the same point.

Have you ever seen the movie Julie and Julia? Julie is a blogger who, through some changes in her life, comes to learn to cook (that's not exactly right, but good enough for my purposes here) by preparing so many of Julia Childs' recipes every week, with the intent of completing the whole cookbook within a year. And she blogs about her experience with it all? Well, that's the kind of thing I'd like to commit to: Some n number of posts every week for a year until I meet my goal.

I would likely not do it here, but on RedAlt, which seems a better venue for the topic. I could have guest authors, or interviews with people who do design for a living and ask them for specific insight. This could finally get my designer friends to get off their butts and help me produce this thing that I feel really needs to be published. And discussion in the comments could be very worthwhile, both with people who are designers with advice for doing the work and with developers who want to learn along with me.

Depending how it goes, it could even become profitable somehow. Sure, there's no guarantee, and that's not really the point. The profit is in the learning. But a little extra cash to make up for the time and hosting would be nice.

Is this crazy? Worthwhile? Would you read it?

I read an article yesterday about how we need to get rid of window chrome - that stuff used to decorate application interfaces to make them look like real-world, tactile controls, even though they're just displayed on a screen. For example, some applications - particularly the ones that edit video and audio - include a lot of knobs in their interfaces. The knobs simulate real knobs, but they replace a control, the spinbox, that would work equally well, probably better if you're not used to the real world editing tools that use knobs. And now that it's more likely you're doing editing on a computer rather than some kind of studio rack, there's really no excuse to continue simulating what you might never have seen and used in person.

Have you noticed the same thing I have with the evolution of cell phones that each new iteration is still missing things that consumers might demand? There are a couple of easy answers for why companies don't make the ultimate phone. One is that they think it would be prohibitive in expense for people to buy it. Another is that they're purposefully mixing all of the features up to keep consumers confused and sell new phones. I think paranoia has me believing this latter option.

But I wonder if it all comes down to a lack of pairing user experience design disciplines with practical implementation with good sales and marketing. A recent tweet crossed my reader about how you need to be able to either sell or build to make a successful tech company, and while that might be true, I suspect that it might be more of a triumvirate that includes a designer. So it's sell, build, or design. And in this way, I think I'm slamming together design in both an experience sense and a graphic sense. Because who wants to use an ugly product?

Many designers (and the people that hire them) don't realize or appreciate what happens on the development side of their web projects. Tweaking things a pixel this way or that for them is a matter of dragging it around in Photoshop until it looks good. They then hand it off to a developer expecting it's done, when in reality we not only need to do the same thing they did (at least in terms of positioning, if not aesthetics), but we have to do it by typing in code that they're typically completely incapable of producing themselves. Regardless of having to reproduce their designs in code, we frequently need at least rudimentary skills with design tools like Photoshop both to open their files and prepare their designs for the web, and the overlap is such that the only things we're really missing are 4 years of design classes (trivial compared to what we're forced by our profession to learn almost daily), and that harder to obtain ineffable sense of what "looks good".

In addition to converting their designs to code, we often need to produce, install, or at least troubleshoot a back end that lets someone create content, make it account in some way for the fact that those content creators are going to screw up the designer's pixel-perfect vision for the site with poorly-formed content, and code it all so that it scales over hundreds of pages that individually vary the one or two designs they've so elegantly produced. And too often, we're left to explain issues to the client of why the site doesn't do anything interactive (because there's no design for it), or why their navigation colors won't appear on top of the image that the client swaps in later (because it doesn't magically change from low-contrast black to high-contrast white), or why search engines will never find that paragraph of text that absolutely must be in that bizzaro font in that weird texture pattern in front of that stock art I've seen lately on your competitor's site.

I recognize that I do not have a designer's design skill. Nonetheless, what I do is not only a completely congruent skill set - in my estimation, requiring more than just the designer-like natural ability to be creative and persistent competence, but also real, continuous learning and refinement of technology and technique - but it is also an art in that it takes creativity to solve all of the problems that these graphic designers carelessly cast to us to solve without a clue themselves for how to do it, or even in most cases that it's a problem at all.

Yes, it's work, and it takes time, and it's every bit as complex as as design, and takes just as much creativity. Just because you can't see it or understand it doesn't mean you should not appreciate it; doesn't mean it is not so. I'll never be belittled by a designer again. My accumulation of years of experience applied to turning your pretty pictures into a working, breathing web site demands your respect, and I'll have it.

And to any designer that says "that's not me", sure. You're right. That's not you. But if you're saying, "I don't see what's so hard," then you're the one with the problem. But you're not reading my site anyway, are you?

Friends, I stand before you unabashed and in contempt. I refuse to be an enabler for mindless tolerance any more.

You know it in your heart that this is true. If you have any competence at interface design, you cannot deny it. If you've used any of the other packages for design out there, you know that Photoshop has nothing essential or unique except a complete lack of intuitiveness.

My main complaint: I can't click on something I see to select it. I grant you, layers in Photoshop are all (more or less) bitmaps. And as such, they're not really objects. But any designer worth his salt is going to use layers, and there's no easy way to select the layer of something you see on screen. There really should be a simple tool that allows you to click on the canvas, and select the layer that is providing that pixel for viewing. Any other tool can do this, including those that composite layers of bitmaps, not just the vector tools.

Maybe I just missed that option. Still, the layer highlighting is poor when you finally get the one you want. And the UI surrounding the canvas never makes sense. Color selection? Forget it. And even when I think to use Photoshop for photo modification, the task for which is was actually designed, I do much better using something simpler (and designed later) like Photoshop Elements.

I'm convinced that it's not that I'm stupid. I can use Fireworks. I can use Photopaint. I can use Paintshop Pro. None of these tools have the same first-use irritation that accompanies Photoshop.

People will say that Photoshop has more power, and that's why everyone uses it. Bull! Show me one thing useful to web design that Photoshop does that you can't also do with a tool that handles layers in an intelligible way. Most programs can also use Photoshop plugins. There's really no excuse to stick with Photoshop except that it's what poor tool you were introduced to when you started designing, and if you took time to switch we'd all be better off.

I can only assume that there's some amazing features under the hood of Photoshop that do photo compositing or something that I'm never going to need to do that make it worthwhile for photographic designers that leads to this contagion of every designer wanting to provide his web designs in a format that costs $800+ to open properly. Is that why you're using Photoshop, for photo compositing? Good for you. Keep using Photoshop. None of the designs I need should be using that, thus no designer I work with should be using that.

What I want to know is what marketing fumble led to Corel not having the dominant tool. Each Corel release is at least a year beyond its Adobe counterpart (apart from Flash, which I still think of as a Macromedia product). You don't need to think overly hard to use Corel interfaces. Comparatively, looking at Photoshop's bandage toolbar button, I can think of nothing but the impending pain of having to use their crap.

I don't know what has led to this consensual hallucination that we should just accept designs in Photoshop. It's ridiculous. I'm going to insist that all of my designs come in as layered Fireworks PNGs from now on.