Josh On Design

If you've found this site you probably came from one of my technical blogs on Java, JavaFX or fun JavaFX demo. First let me say: Welcome! I'm glad you are joining me in what I hope will be a fun and engaging site. This post is the first of what will be many posts and essays on the topics of design, usability, and aesthetics. So let me dive in and tell what this is all about.

This blog is about Design with a capital D. More specifically user interface design for software, though I plan to cover topics generally applicable to many fields. By 'Design' I mean not just the making things pretty aspect of visual aesthetics (commonly called 'graphic design'), but also interaction design, usability, and human centered engineering in general. I'm not a graphic designer so making things pretty will be only a small portion of the blog (though hopefully our skills will improve over time together). Why another design blog? It's true, if you search for 'design blog' in Google you will find endless sources, mostly focused on how to do things in Photoshop and Illustrator, the two great tools used by virtually all graphic designers. Even when their focus isn't specifically on how to do things in those editing tools, they are still targeted at graphic designers. But not this blog. This blog is aimed squarely for software engineers. The people who code up real software used by real people. Now, why, you may ask, did I make a blog targeted at engineers? Aren't most engineers bad at design? Do they even care? Well, that is exactly the point. Software engineers are the ones most in need of some design education. And while they may not all care about design, my experiences writing and speaking has shown me that there are a great many engineers who do in fact care and want to learn more. Thus, this blog.

What can you expect? Well, besides asking my own questions that I then answer, I plan to cover many aspects of designing good human centered software. I'll cover how to plan and build good user interfaces, how to effectively test software on real users, how to work with graphic designers, and yes: how to make things pretty. What can you *not* expect? First, I don't plan to cover JavaFX or Swing. I certainly will use them in examples since my expertise in those technologies makes them effective teaching tools. However, no particular technology will be my focus. The point is to discuss and learn the timeless principles of design. Principles which apply whether you are using JavaFX, Silverlight, CSS, or paper and pencil. Good design is good design. I think I will leave it there for now and enjoy some rare Pacific Northwest Sunshine (TM). If you choose to add my RSS feed to your reader, then I'll be seeing you again soon. Thanks!

- Josh