I am a front-end web professional whose title has incorporated ‘Designer’ (and more recently, ‘Developer’) since just after Y2K. In this time I’ve come to appreciate the different perspectives of the professionals building the different ends of today’s web applications, and the differences in the concerns and vocabulary of these and those of the business leaders whose visions drive the work. Ultimately I’ve discovered that as a user interface designer and developer, my job entails mediating solutions between stakeholders in ways that for all intents and purposes makes designers of us all.
I work as an in-house designer/developer for a large financial institution and this site carries posts under the categories of Business (strategy), Code (tactics), and Design (inspiration). Correctly balancing these three perspectives is the key to my everyday. I think Apple’s interface design is pretty slick, I like eye candy, and I’ve settled on 2-3px as my preferred border radius. But at the end of the day my work makes it to market because of the trust and work of others, and I hope I acknowledge this at the same time that I rant on process, pixels, and experience.
I studied 18 months of Finance, Statistics, Marketing and Strategy in getting my MBA from the HEC School of Management in Versailles, France, but have taken some of my most valuable lessons in the bank’s IT department. I design and develop standards-based applications that run in ever more capable browsers and code mostly in framework-supported JavaScript. I draw my inspiration from best-of-the-breed on the web, but also from entirely different sources. My most important source of all is my family, which keeps me grounded, focused, and – these days – in constant awe of the tabulae rasae that young minds are.
Read and enjoy. Comment and post. Goodnight and good luck.
Alex