Comments on: So… What’s on your Grails kungfu list?

By: stravinskij

stravinskij — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:26:12 +0000

Working for a small company on many solo JEE projects, I felt compelled to learn some basic web design principles, because nobody, our customers, of course, but also my manager and, perhaps most of all, I myself, could not stand looking at those ugly interfaces. One book that I would warmly recommend to a beginner is “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” by Jason Beaird.

By: Peter Kelley

Peter Kelley — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:50 +0000

I hear you Glen. I’ve been thinking the exact same thing. The websites I am putting up at the moment lack even rudimentary design skills and some of those are being deployed to customers! I’d be interested in whether programmers can learn design. The conventional wisdom used to be that we would leave that to the “fluffy” people but more and more I am being labeled the web designer in the office simply because I have a basic understanding of CSS.

I ran across a very interesting article on web 2.0 design that you might be interested in:

http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-2.0-design-style-guide.cfm

By: doyle

doyle — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:49:42 +0000

You know design does matter. I think as we consolidate to more agile approaches people will look for the all in one guy. I myself have just launched a production grails application. I think that the default create pages and views should get away from the table layout and move to a fieldset, with a dl , dt , dd approach since it is easier to style with css. the dt, dd tags really are name value centric tables are good for data but not layout.

-Doyle

By: Jim Shingler

Jim Shingler — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 18:51:43 +0000

Sweet!

I look forward to seeing your posts. Any pointers your can provide would be GREATLY appreciated. As you see, I am Graphically challenged. That is a skill that I wish I we better at to. Unfortunately, my day job and evening job (Also killing a tree) keeps me from getting to far into it.

Again, Great Work I look forward to seeing your posts and listening to more of Grails Podcasts.

BTW, Do you think you could mention some of your findings on the Podcast as well, I think that would make a good discussion.

Jim

By: Bernd Schiffer

Bernd Schiffer — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 12:51:46 +0000

Yeah, design matters! I have always liked to read about the way the Rails guys from 37Signals deals with design. It's very interesting to see them build design step by step, and it's important to understand, where and why details matter. Have a look to their blog Signal vs. Noise, if you're not already familiar with it (the posts titled "Design Decision: ..." are the ones you should read, like this one).

By: dahernan

dahernan — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:53:55 +0000

Until around 1 year, I was a very clumsy with design, I hate photoshop, gimp, layers and raster. But I tried it with vector design and I followed some inkscape tutorials and screencast

http://del.icio.us/dahernan/inkscape

And now no problem, I do gradients, icons, logo design, backgrounds for my slides, etc, etc.

Give a chance.

Cheers

By: Howard

Howard — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:42:27 +0000

Oh, so what’s your book’s title? :-p