Interface Design Code, Inspiration, and Camels

Over at Functioning Form, Luke Wroblewski has written a post called The Impact of Interface Design Markup which deals with interface design technologies, certain to be a major topic in the future. He includes a quote from Bob Baxley suggesting that future visual designers might lay out more of their design in production code, rather than in some visual-editing application like Fireworks or Photoshop. A prime example of this, of course, is SVG, or scalable vector graphics. If browsers get support for these, then graphic designers can start laying out complete pages in code, with nary an HTML tag in sight.

Jeff Veen has an interesting post about when/how design happens. He suggests that often the solutions to design problems come after he’s stewed on them for a while. This sounds right, but the usability side of me cringes a bit, knowing how the most inspired solutions, which work great for designers during their time on the project, sometimes end up working not at all when real users get their hands on them. Probably not in Jeff’s case, but users are the ultimate arbiters of any project.

Finally, if you haven’t already, go read Camels and Rubber Duckies by Joel Spolsky. And obviously, don’t just think in terms of software…