Choosing the Right Team - Living in Perfect Harmony
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Communication plays a major role in your customer relationships. There’s also a huge need for internal communication between you and your staff, as well as among the staff members themselves. Most importantly, the designer-programmer relationship has to have excellent communication. Both the programmer and designer have to be in tune and must know each other’s capabilities and limitations.
On the first project that I worked on with a real designer, we had no idea of how to work together. At the time, the design tools had little to do with the web environment. So naturally, we had to go through a process of understanding each other's tools and needs. After the first project was designed, we realized that the original layout had brought up a few programming issues. Therefore, through communication, we established a few ground rules regarding what could be good for my programming, which the designer could take into consideration. Likewise, I had to learn a few things in order to keep the programming according to the designer’s original concept.
Even today, where we have design suites that completely interact with each other's products, there is still a need for the designer and programmer to set their own rules to be used in their working relationship. These rules have been the basis for every project and we are still following them. Whenever I get to work with a new designer I use these rules to accelerate the getting-to-know-each-other process. And it works!
Conclusion
Remember the famous Olympic Dream team? It was a fabulous basketball team with only the best players in the NBA. Needless to say, they won all the games. You too can win all the games. Start by building a team with experts in every area of your company—technical and/or creative.
(This article originally appeared in the May 2004 issue of Plug-in).
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