D evelopers have their own mindset about design. Designers have their own mindset about development. Each group tends to "cancel" the other out. Developers consider design to be the functional equivalent of code markup. They know that good design will make their "code" shine even better, yet they are reluctant to take the time to consider what is involved. Designers are exactly the same about development. They will use any WYSIWIG editor to get the job done and if there are blantant errors in scripting, so be it. But if there is one pixel out of place, then you will hear about it. At Bunker 8, we insure that on every project there are the technicians and the designer because in the end, it is the serving of both of those disciplines that makes for great design. As it so happens, the client for this site was a brilliant coder and a frustrated designer at precisely the same time
DrySQL is a Ruby plug-in that extends ActiveRecord and applies the DRY principle to Object-Relational Mapping In order to understand the direction of this site, there were a number of sessions where we thoroughly examined the details of what exactly "Dry SQL" was all about. So, here it is...
"DrySQL is a Ruby plug-in that extends ActiveRecord and applies the DRY principle to Object-Relational Mapping.
DrySQL reflects on your database's schema and automatically generates your model classes' associations and validations, and correctly identifies your columns and keys.
The philosophy behind DrySQL is that you define columns, keys, constraints, and relationships on your database, and you shouldn't need to re-define any of these things in your application code."
Awesome stuff. We loved the opportunity to work on something that was being extended to the open source community. After all, we use a ton of open source products in our development such as "Eclipse", "Notepad ++", etc. and we look forward to the opportunity of making a difference for this client as well.
We decided to create a very clean, symbols based design, using simple clean greys and steel blues. The icons were designed in illustrator and ported over into fireworks. After getting the design correctly done in a flat, it was time to look at the technical aspects of integration.
In the end, this was a very satisfying project because we were given a "clean" slateThis was something that we did not sweat long and hard over. It seemed that the most appropriate platform for delivery would be HTML templates with a CSS focused integration. We set about the business of laying out the site using DIVS, but the client insisted on a table based designed. We always know that satisfying the client requirements can often mean taking an aspect of their technical considerations in mind during the integration phase. This was no different.
In the end, this was a very satisfying project because we were given a "clean" slate and the client was satisfied right away with the designs presented to them. You can spend a good deal of time waxing over the small stuff, or you can get it done. In this case, we made it happen in less than a week and the client was able to perform updates easily to their site and still maintain the look and feel around the product. It was anything but "dry" from an experience perspective.