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Graphic Design

My speciality is in "backend" programming, not graphic design. For graphically ambitious projects, I usually team with a graphic designer.

Good graphic design is critical to produce a product that appeals to your users. Even products for internal use at your company or organization will benefit from good graphic design. Good graphic design will increase the usability of a product. For products for internal use only, it is often acceptable to use off-the-shelf graphic designs, removing the need to hire a graphic designer; for public websites, usually you will want to hire a graphic designer who can make your site unique and memorable.

In collaboration with you, the graphic designer will design the site and translate their design into images, CSS and HTML. Simultaneously, I will develop the backend and deliver an unstyled website in HTML. This website will have all the navigation and functionality of the final website, but without the images and styling.

At this point, the initial application of the design to the unstyled website happens. The backend is designed so that most of the program logic is cleanly separated from the HTML presentation; therefore graphic designers with good programming skills can take the unstyled website HTML and apply their styles. For graphic designers without the requisite programming skills, I can perform this step.

At this point fixes and iterative refinements to the graphic design are usually needed. I strongly prefer to work with graphic designers with enough technical skills to accomplish these iterative refinements on their own. Since I am not involved as an intermediary, this results in fewer total hours (programming + graphic design) billed to the client.

Therefore, graphic designers should be able to: setup a development environment to run the website on their own PC; be able to use version control such as Subversion to submit their work and manage their files; and be able to login to a linux server and run basic commands (changing directories, removing and editing files, etc.) at the command line. They should also be able to work with HTML code directly and be able to understand and work with simple programming constructs (if statements, for statements, variables). For this level of understanding, the first several weeks of an introductory programming course should be sufficient preparation.

If the graphic designer does not possess these skills, I will need to do additional work as an intermediary, which slows down work and results in more total hours spent.