Web Development

9/30 CDIA Speaker Series with Ethan Marcotte

October 3, 2008 Ethan Marcotte, Senior Designer at Airbag Industries in Cambridge, came to CDIA-Waltham on 9/30 to discuss the relationship between web designers and developers.

First of all, I'd like to thank CDIA for having me: I had a wonderful time visiting the space, seeing the recent graduates' work in the halls and hearing more about the program.

My talk was called "Comps vs. Code: Couples' Therapy", and deals with a lot of the challenges that web designers and developers have in working together. After a decade or so of working on the web, I

believe there's more than one kind of client: there's obviously the "actual" client, whose work we're doing, but it's also important to treat the other people on your project team as clients. Whether you're  

a designer or a developer, it can be useful to:

• Go over important requirements with the person heading up the phase of the project following yours.
• Review your work early and often with that person, to make sure that they can start thinking about the work in front of them.
• Review their work, to make sure that all those requirements are being met.

Here are a few of the links I mentioned during my talk:

sIFR: http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/

SWFObject: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

Flash Satay: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay

Son of Suckerfish: http://htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/

ExpressionEngine: http://expressionengine.com/

And here are the projects I discussed:

2008 Sundance Film Festival: http://festival.sundance.org/

The Today Show:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032633/

The W3C: http://w3.org/ (Still in progress)

Finally, I'd like to thank you all for coming out to hear the talk. I'd especially like to thank former Graphic and Web Design program director Jeremy Osborn for recommending me, Liz Menard for passing my  

name along, and Maureen Lawson for inviting me to speak and for coordinating the event. I had a great time!

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