"I'm a guy, I don't care about colours" -- male DESIGNER

[justira]

So, every Friday, I have a meeting in the morning with the group I've been put on that's in charge of creating non-blindness-inducing layouts for my entire branch. At first I was really nervous about being on this team because hell, I'm young, I'm new, and well, it's not like I'm extraordinary at design.

However, after a couple months of coming to these meetings, it is clear: I am on this group because the medium amount of talent I have in this field is just leagues above the current design talent in the department. This is REALLY DEPRESSING because seriously, I'm no genius here. I like to design, but my strength is all-around web development, because I like to play with code.

Nonetheless, every Friday you can count on me being pissed off 10 billion different ways at the incompetence here. My peeves include everything from gross offenses against aesthetics to the inability of the other designer on the team to understand this whole web standards thing. I swear, the man has no idea how to work with CSS. My previous rant on this mess is here.

I don't feel like ranting forever and ever about this subject today, so I will just include a couple of examples and a gem of a quote from this guy.

We were assigned different types of layouts to make.

I was in charge of making a layout for really data-heavy applications with lots of forms, tables, very deep menus. These layouts will mostly be used internally for applications, and won't be too visible to the public. At the moment, I have a very, very rough draft of a mockup. Certain elements I HAD to have (department regulations), like the white background, the simple border around the main part of the layout, the usability nav area in the upper right, the ugly-ass footer at the bottom. It still needs a LOT of typographical help, but this is the direction I'm headed:

[pictures removed after a few days]

The other guy, Erik, was in charge in making publicly available sites for things like announcing/arranging/signing up for conferences, public relations for various groups, etc. This basically means that people other than our branch (the general public) will see this design. This design is his baby and he loves it hard and, yes, the images here are the ones he wants to use, not placeholders:

[pictures removed after a few days]

Note that his layout wouldn't fit on an 800x600 monitor ever ever.

At one point, I brought up the issue of colour schemes, thinking I needed to create several different palettes for my design so each group could implement a unique colour scheme, and also because there was too much blue and I needed highlight colours. This guy's answer? Keeping in mind that he's a DESIGNER?

"I'm a guy, I don't care about colours."

...

Right.

Well, on a different note, I've been trying to finally come up with a layout for my personal site that I don't hate. I've been trying really hard to wean myself off muted/dark colours, and so I was trying to go for something bright and fun and clean. This is the current incarnation:


(click thumb for full size -- the actual screencap is super-wide so I can see how it looks on huge monitors)

It is FAR from finalized, but I think I like the direction it's going. Feedback is welcome =D

Comments

[nanthimus.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I know I come off as nonchalant when it comes to web standards and simple website design, but I'm a newbie and it's not my job(yet). This guy is, just. Wow. And he doesn't care about colors and he's a DESIGNER? Caring about color schemes won't make you gay, son, no matter what you've been told.

WOW.

[justira.livejournal.com]

Yeah, uh. This guy pisses me off hardcore. I've been trying to push the group in the direction os less sucking without stepping any toes, but it's really hard because this guy adores his work and prickles at the idea of standards and templates because it "limits his creativity". FYI, the idea behind our group is to create a more standard look and feel for all the sites from the department (among many, many other things we're trying to fix).

(My boss' response when I relayed that particular tidbit when I came to rant at him about why the hell do I have to put up with this was: "Exercising creativity is great -- when you have it." I love my boss ♥)

Also, that comment was way sexist. I would kill for the sheer genuis with colour that some guys I know have. And gasp! They're not gay!

[nanthimus.livejournal.com]

On a different note, though, your personal website is very pretty. :)

[justira.livejournal.com]

Heee thank you ^_^

[flyboymike.livejournal.com]

"I don't care about colors."

Would the pilot equivalent of that be "I don't care about airspace restrictions"?

Your personal page looks good. What's with the dude's two olive drab stripes?

Will your work page have data with numbers that people want to copy into spreadsheet software? If so, it'd make their lives a lot easier if you could figure out a way they could highlight just each column to make copy-pasting easier.

[justira.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that sounds about right XD

I don't know what's up with the olive stripes. He doesn't care about colours, remember?

Thanks about the personal page, though. I'm a little terrified of how bright it is XD

As for the work page -- there shouldn't be any need to bounce stuff between the site and spreadsheet software because, well, I guess the site IS the spreadsheet software. The types of applications I'm working with are basically big databases that need to be manipulated and displayed. I'm actually not sure where you get the idea of c/ping stuff around like that, cause nothing like that goes on here, and if there were a need to constantly bounce data back and forth between a web application and, say, Excel, it would be far more efficient to write a program that would import/export the data back and forth automatically.

Also, seeing as these sites (on the client side, at least) would be plain vanilla XHTML, there is no way, to my knowledge, to highlight only one column of a table at a time (and still have it be a table structurally). This isn't a design issue or a coding issue -- it's just the way the system works. I'm actually not sure if it's the browser or the OS that determines how highlighting works, but either way it's not under my control. If I needed that capability I would have to make it not-XHTML, through using, oh, I don't know. A Java applet that would highlight a column if you clicked on its header like Excel does. But again, that would basically be writing a program to perform specific tasks. I'm just trying to design an XHTML page to display table-format data here XD

[flyboymike.livejournal.com]

I got the idea because I've been crunching the data for my results from the past season of autocrossing, and I'm doing it in Excel. The times are typically just kind of typed out. I wind up doing a loooot of physically typing in each number because I can't copy-paste the way Excel wants... at least as far as I know now...

Y'know, I'm a stereotypical guy when it comes to caring about aesthetics in a lot of things, but that doesn't mean I can't tell when something is off. Even I, who have never designed any kind of website, understand that the first job is to make the page legible, and the first key to that is to NOT HURT THE VIEWER'S EYES, which is to say, PICK THE RIGHT FUCKIN' COLORS. You don't need an aerospace engineering degree or boobs to figure that one out.

[justira.livejournal.com]

Wow, that sounds liek lots of fun! I'm sorry about the times, though, yeah. It's just the way tables work, I guess =\

See, I understand not making colour-coodinating your life a top priority, whether you're a guy or a girl. But I do seem to have this weird idealistic impression that everyone has SOME taste and can tell when their retinas are being burned. Apparently I am mistaken!

Thanks for listening to me vent ^^;

[ellisbben.livejournal.com]

Sounds like this guy doesn't want to do his job and wants to implicitly criticize you for the crimes of being female and caring about colors, a.k.a. wanting to do your job.

[justira.livejournal.com]

Heyyy, it's Ben! Long tiem no see!

And really I don't know what this guy's problem is. He said before he didn't like templates or standards because he "wanted to exercise his creativity" and then he says he "doesn't care about colours". So basically he doesn't want me (or anyone else) intruding on his domain but at the same time doesn't know enough about his craft to produce quality work -- or even know when he says something asinine and completely opposite of what his job entails.

As far as girls and colours, man, I have seen women who couldn't match BLACK to a decent colour and guys whose colour sense I'd kill for. Eric (this guy) can screw off =P

[kaizoku-shinobi.livejournal.com]

*waves* Hi! Been a small while. ^^ I checked out your page design, nice color scheme. I adore the bright colors, gives it a nice, happy, atmoshpere. I agree with you on Erik's design. Really, at the most basic level, it's not so bad. But for me, it's a bit....Plain. And the blue kinda hurts my eyes. Plus, the three pictures don't really go very well together or with the site. I would suggest some contrast and better placement of better pictures. And some unique layout ideas. But I'm 13 and I'm not a web designer, just a noviec artist. ^^;

[kaizoku-shinobi.livejournal.com]

Forgot to include this in my previous comment.

Erik, no offense, but you lack picture picking skills. People can read, they can tell what it's about. If you need pictures that blatantly show exactly what the title say, make a website for kindergardners.

But seriously, that much blue is making my blind.