Sorry for the lull in posting here, folks. I’ve had a family emergency and tragedy so I took some time off of work. Now we’re trying to pick up the pieces of our lives, and of course with this, I’m trying to reroute my energies back into my blogging and design-related writings.

Here’s a great piece from 37signals on how designers work. Nothing really in-depth, but the message is deep. 37signals says their designers “apply their talents to the native materials of the web by working directly with HTML, CSS, and occasionally Ruby code or JavaScript.”

Designers decide and design the flow, the copy, the structure of the page, the programmers make all of it come to life by plugging it into the backend. All along both parties trade concessions on how to get the feature done as fast possible by grabbing the easiest value.

So stop thinking about designers as artists who work in a different universe of neat graphics and start thinking of them as someone who decides what goes where, which form elements to use, how to split features between screens, what words to use, and how everything fits together in a coherent experience.

So designers are no different from the rest of us (especially programmers/developers, since people often have this misconception that there is a great rift between designers and developers). They use the same tools and building blocks. Of course, with their talent, things turn out differently.