An Event Apart Interview
Originally published on October 19, 2019 at aneventapart.com
Kayte is a designer, developer, and illustrator with web design and development roots dating back to 1998, “when spacer gifs were a thing and tables were the page layout weapon of choice.” As a design and development specialist for the Province of Nova Scotia (Canada) and a Drupal developer, she wears many hats.
You’ve been designing websites for nearly twenty years. How do you stay engaged and excited?
The web is constantly evolving and things change so fast, that makes it easier to stay engaged and excited about doing this work.
For example—I took a few months off after my daughter was born and during this time Ethan Marcotte’s article on Responsive Web Design came out. When I started picking up work again I discovered that there was a whole new approach to web design that I was completely out of touch with!
Websites were a whole new medium when I started out. As an industry, our understanding of what it means to communicate effectively online and the landscape in which we try to figure this out has evolved so dramatically during the past two decades. I can’t wait to see where things go next; this is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
With all the tools available for modern web designers, why do you keep going back to pen and paper? What’s the magic of those basic tools?
I’m a visual thinker, so doodling and sketching things has always been a big part of the way I take information in and figure stuff out.
Working out technical problems in an analog space requires a level of attention to detail that you can bypass with a lot of modern tools that have elements which you can just drag and drop.
But I love to draw, and find when I’m engaged in a tactile activity I’m able to achieve a level of focus that I can’t quite tune into when I’m using digital tools. (If I do need to present a concept early on, I will usually create a cleaned up version in Balsamiq.)
You rough out your design in pen, then fill in the details in code, bypassing the Photoshop/Sketch phase altogether. How long have you been designing in the browser? How do you present your work to clients for design approval?
I’ve been doing design work in the browser for about a year now. Rather than presenting a mock-up for approval, I draft up a prototype of each content type (example: main page, internal page) and send clients a link so they can view it in their browser.
Most of the time, I’m doing the design and development, so it felt like I was doing the work in Photoshop/Sketch and then doing the same work all over again in HTML and CSS. So, for me, this design-in-the-browser approach saves a lot of time.
If you build responsive sites (especially if you use SASS), coding them up is far more efficient than creating several flat mock-ups of the same thing as it will appear on different devices.
Taking an atomic approach to design and developing a pattern library is another thing that facilitates faster coding. I like to use GitHub to curate my patterns and SASS files; introducing real version control into my design process has been great. I could be a lot better at writing commit messages (I have no idea what I meant by “Cleaning up the Goo” a year ago!), but at least I have a detailed record of what I changed where and when.