Killing Time
Feb. 15th, 2004 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerPutting off writing some code I've promised to write for my parents, fairly simple, but I can see that it's going to be making it nice to use that's the hard bit.
I _hate_ making things nice to use. Once it's functional, the fun bit's over - I've made some part of the universe move in a way that does something that's useful. I've bent it to my whim and shown that I was better than it was. Making it look pretty is a job that's (a) never over and (b) incredibly fiddly. I need to work with people that can deal with with aesthetics for me or they tend to just not happen.
Which is one of the reasons I'm _appalling_ at getting web pages done. I know the basic syntax, but when you get right down to it it's all about _layout_, which is something I only care about up to a point. That point being "It's readable." I can happily debug other people's HTML code if I'm given a specific goal - "Can you make those tables line up" or "Why do the pictures keep moving about?" or something similar. But faced with something that's just plain ugly I have _no idea_ what to do.
It's not that I can't recognise the difference between prettiness and ugliness (well, ther's disagreement there, but I'm not going to argue about taste here), it's that I can't see a way from A to B - the fact that lightening the background colour, reducing the font size and dividing the layout into blocks will suddenly make it 300% more readable is just _beyond_ me.
For some reason this doesn't apply to text - I can copyedit until the cows come home. I even find it fun. I wonder if this is something I can learn, of if it's built in.
I _hate_ making things nice to use. Once it's functional, the fun bit's over - I've made some part of the universe move in a way that does something that's useful. I've bent it to my whim and shown that I was better than it was. Making it look pretty is a job that's (a) never over and (b) incredibly fiddly. I need to work with people that can deal with with aesthetics for me or they tend to just not happen.
Which is one of the reasons I'm _appalling_ at getting web pages done. I know the basic syntax, but when you get right down to it it's all about _layout_, which is something I only care about up to a point. That point being "It's readable." I can happily debug other people's HTML code if I'm given a specific goal - "Can you make those tables line up" or "Why do the pictures keep moving about?" or something similar. But faced with something that's just plain ugly I have _no idea_ what to do.
It's not that I can't recognise the difference between prettiness and ugliness (well, ther's disagreement there, but I'm not going to argue about taste here), it's that I can't see a way from A to B - the fact that lightening the background colour, reducing the font size and dividing the layout into blocks will suddenly make it 300% more readable is just _beyond_ me.
For some reason this doesn't apply to text - I can copyedit until the cows come home. I even find it fun. I wonder if this is something I can learn, of if it's built in.
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Re:
Date: 2004-02-15 04:01 pm (UTC)