Forum Moderators: phranque
But what I can't do is "design".
I'm a programmer. A techie. A nerd. And as a breed we are not well known for our artistic flair. All my designs tend to look a bit boring or are just thinly disguised rip-offs of another page.
So, question: "Given that I am creatively-disadvantaged, could I still make a career out of developing web pages for people?"
I've done contract work in the past, but I had a third party handle the 'arty' design bit for me, while I concentrated on dealing with the clients, organising the site and the actual nitty-gritty of coding.
Being a hippy type I believe that everyone has the potential for creativity, whether they realise it or not.
Being color blind, I believe that some people have more potential than others for creating attractive designs. Hey, I think red flowers are boring because you can't see them until you get close enough to see that they are shaped differently from the green leaves (it's not quite that bad, but you get it).
I do okay with shapes though.
Perhaps you meant Michelangelo Buonarroti (who was taught by Ghirlandaio and then Bertoldo di Giovanni) and Vincent Van Gogh (who began by copying Millet and was helped by Pissarro)?
I think this just makes Knighty's point. Millet versus Van Gogh? At least since Vasari, we must recognize the difference between technique and genius.
Also, Zaphod's point is good. I pick up languages pretty well. I see other people who are real smart, but their ears just don't work like mine do. On the other hand, their eyes often work much better.
Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to stretch myself and do the best I can to make things a little more elegant, but no amount of practice is gonig to change the fact that I need a second person so I can ask "Is x the same color as y?" I can only get so far using the eyedropper to return RGB values. Sometimes you need someone who has the eye.
There are good tools out there to help "marry" colors in fine once you have a page styled or "designed" in main. These include various helpers which will give "complementary" or secondary colors once a main color-schema is decided. At that point you would perhaps want to ask someone whose overall taste you trust to look at the page and see if anything "glares".
Alternatively, you might simply choose to become a designer in grey-scale. There are bonuses to doing this: main thing is that the content is NEVER LOST among the colors - in other words, you CAN see the forest for the trees....
There are good tools out there to help "marry" colors
Just found [easyrgb.com...] - you enter your chosen colour and it tells you which colours harmonise with it.
Useful.
"michangelo" and "van goth"? I have no idea who those people are... :)Perhaps you meant Michelangelo Buonarroti (who was taught by Ghirlandaio and then Bertoldo di Giovanni) and Vincent Van Gogh (who began by copying Millet and was helped by Pissarro)?
Wow! That truly is amazing! You had no idea who I was talking about yet you managed to guess correctly!
Truly outstanding! if only your design skills matched those of your guessing skills :)
ergophobe, you're confusing an inability to see color ranges as in a "norm" or "standard" with an inability to design.
Yes and no. It's a bit more complicated. I started out with bad vision and didn't get glasses for far too long (as a kid) and was colorblind to boot. So in baseball, I always thought that the ball disappeared into the sky. You waited until it fell far enough and when it reappeared, you started running to catch it. It didn't actually occur to me that other kids just watched it the whole time. When I finally got glasses at 14, I was amazed at how trivial catching a ball is.
Similarly, I thought everyone was able to read only 2-3 letters out of five when the teacher was writing on the board and they were piecing the meaning together based on those clues just like me.
The consequence is I developed certain abilities while others languished. To this day I'm mediocre at sports involving balls, but good at sports that involve balance. I'm also internationally recognized for my ability to read old manuscripts with bad handwriting and crossouts - I spent all my formative years learning to read being only able to see some of the writing. I've also got a great sense of direction since I had to learn to navigate based on far fewer clues than most people.
On the other hand, I think because there was so much I couldn't see, I tended to exercise the certain portions of my brain much less. I worked on websites with a designer for a while and we realized that we were attracted to and focussed on completely different aspects of a page. As far as he was concerned, there was no reason to have text there at all "since nobody looks at text anyway". I tried to explain that from my perspective, I usually hardly notice graphics and tend to see a page without text as a "blank" page, and that often includes text presented as a funky graphic.
Please understand that I am not saying I can't learn. In fact, I'm not even saying I won't learn - I plan on it. However, I do notice that things my wife (who likes to sketch and so on) considers to be on an unlearned, instinctual perception level, are sometimes things that I need practice. She did too, of course, she just did it 25 years ago before she knew she was practicing design and I'm sort of working on it now.
On the color part, it is frustrating, though, when you make your best effort and people tell you "No the green one. The green one. The GREEN one!" :-)
Tom
Don't you love when you go into a store that has a credit/debit card machine that customers have to use to purchase items and all the text has been rubbed off. When you ask what buttons you are supposed to press, the response is always "the blue/green/red/whatever button."
Even better is driving at night when some lights are blinking either red or yellow and you can't tell which it is until you are 10 feet from the intersection.
the list goes on and on...
Considering how many of us there are, I can not believe that some usability/safety expert has not mandated that henceforth
- stop = red/square
- go = green/round
- caution - yellow/triangle
I find flashing yellow/red lights incredibly dangerous.
- if it's red and I don't stop, I die
- if it's yellow and I do stop, I get rear-ended by the idiot behind me (hasn't happened yet) or get honked at and have somebody give me the finger (can't even count the number of times that has happened).
