I have friends coming from both sides of the fence that are either programmers or designers, and in my experience programmers are more able to fulfill both sides better than designers.
It could be that the "design factor" is more easily incorporated into the logical procedure of a programmer than the other way round.
For example, the majority of programmers I met have very good writing skills, maybe derived from reading and producing documentation, but the funny thing is that their writing has an outstanding literary quality that goes far beyond the technical aspect. Most of them are very well read, very well spoken and have a clear method of portraying an idea.
Also, a coder seems to be very comfortable handling any element of a project. I could be generalizing from personal experience, but the ones I know, use image editing software and typography equally or better than their design counterparts. Same thing with sound and video editing software.
Of course a designer potentially has a better approach towards interface design and a refined idea of how to set the tone of a project and give it a visually professional quality. But the truth is that most designers lack the originality or the know-how to simplify the creative process and tend to overstuff an idea with irrelevant and meaningless input, but that's another story.
When it comes to crossing the fence, designers are not very well prepared to meet the demands. I've rarely seen a designer who could script client or server side code into a template in a clean, efficient and not redundant way. Or Telnet to a *NIX server and know basic Unix navigation syntax, or know how to change directory permissions, or know a bit of.htaccess, or have a minimal understanding of server-client communication.
It would be really wonderful if designers could bridge the gap and cross over. It is needless to say that I don't think a designer should know the nuts and bolts of programming in order to stop being one, but it would help enormously -specifically in a small environment- if a designer could tweak some PHP and Javascript code, could upload into a server and could handle the sine qua non of the other side.
If we wanted to be European, thoose of us with European ancesstry would not have left.
It's great that those of you with European ancestry have left, because in Europe you would be regarded as a moron.
It is exactly this kind of ethnocentric thinking the one that makes the typical American so naive and ignorant.
I live in Argentina and I can name you your 50 states and at least half of the state capitals, I probably know more American history than your average school guy, I speak 4 languages and am pretty well informed.
Now the point is not that you can't name even one Argentine province, or that you barely speak decent English, but rather that you probably can't name half of your own states.
And from all this you can easily deduct how trivial it is wether you are or are not an American. Because, yes, you hold the world in your hands, and have the last word on almost any order of world affairs, but how bad can it be that the world (a better prepared group of people than yourselves) has an opinion?
Please, don't bother to reply until you go metric.
...to reward an anonymous tip off with a free t-shirt????
Not really, it's a very effective way for propaganda to spread across the country. These W.A.V.E. creeps will give away t-shirts that say: " I snitched for a better America", or other idiocies of the same caliber.
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I have friends coming from both sides of the fence that are either programmers or designers, and in my experience programmers are more able to fulfill both sides better than designers.
It could be that the "design factor" is more easily incorporated into the logical procedure of a programmer than the other way round.
For example, the majority of programmers I met have very good writing skills, maybe derived from reading and producing documentation, but the funny thing is that their writing has an outstanding literary quality that goes far beyond the technical aspect. Most of them are very well read, very well spoken and have a clear method of portraying an idea.
Also, a coder seems to be very comfortable handling any element of a project. I could be generalizing from personal experience, but the ones I know, use image editing software and typography equally or better than their design counterparts. Same thing with sound and video editing software.
Of course a designer potentially has a better approach towards interface design and a refined idea of how to set the tone of a project and give it a visually professional quality. But the truth is that most designers lack the originality or the know-how to simplify the creative process and tend to overstuff an idea with irrelevant and meaningless input, but that's another story.
When it comes to crossing the fence, designers are not very well prepared to meet the demands. I've rarely seen a designer who could script client or server side code into a template in a clean, efficient and not redundant way. Or Telnet to a *NIX server and know basic Unix navigation syntax, or know how to change directory permissions, or know a bit of.htaccess, or have a minimal understanding of server-client communication.
It would be really wonderful if designers could bridge the gap and cross over. It is needless to say that I don't think a designer should know the nuts and bolts of programming in order to stop being one, but it would help enormously -specifically in a small environment- if a designer could tweak some PHP and Javascript code, could upload into a server and could handle the sine qua non of the other side.
If we wanted to be European, thoose of us with European ancesstry would not have left.
It's great that those of you with European ancestry have left, because in Europe you would be regarded as a moron.
It is exactly this kind of ethnocentric thinking the one that makes the typical American so naive and ignorant.
I live in Argentina and I can name you your 50 states and at least half of the state capitals, I probably know more American history than your average school guy, I speak 4 languages and am pretty well informed.
Now the point is not that you can't name even one Argentine province, or that you barely speak decent English, but rather that you probably can't name half of your own states.
And from all this you can easily deduct how trivial it is wether you are or are not an American. Because, yes, you hold the world in your hands, and have the last word on almost any order of world affairs, but how bad can it be that the world (a better prepared group of people than yourselves) has an opinion?
Please, don't bother to reply until you go metric.
...to reward an anonymous tip off with a free t-shirt????
Not really, it's a very effective way for propaganda to spread across the country. These W.A.V.E. creeps will give away t-shirts that say: " I snitched for a better America", or other idiocies of the same caliber.
Kubrick's favourite film was David Lynch's "Eraserhead".
Source: "Lynch on Lynch". Faber & Faber. Edited by Chris Rodley, who also edited "Cronenberg on Cronenberg".