Party Like It's 1997

[serinde]

I've ended up heavily involved in the Shiny New Website for our department, and what this is making abundantly clear to me is that I'm the functional equivalent of the oldsters who would call up $JOB-1 for support because they want to see their grandchildren's pictures on the Googles, and they know a computer is involved but that's about it. There are all sorts of concepts involving information design that are wholly oceanus incognitus for me: words like "wireframe" and "workflow" swirl around me like riptide currents. I am managing to keep my face mostly above water, though. Mostly.

Also, it is strange having to do with a WYSIWYG CMS thingy instead of just banging out a bunch of HTML tags in emacs. I mean, it's not just the fact that you make clicky for boldtext, but the whole difference in what a page or other elements might actually consist of. Not being able to directly manipulate files is turning my world upside-down.

Finally, I have been introduced to Software That Makes Pretty Graphs And Charts. I spent the afternoon making a charty thing. It looks...chartlike. Considering the software is Microsoft spooge, I think that probably constitutes a win.

Comments

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Shall I assume this to be a meaning of “wireframe” that doesn't involve drawing just the edges of a bunch polygons rather than filling them in?

There's also something to be said about $JOB[-1] and not knowing the meaning of the word “workflow”, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Wireframe = one of these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_wireframe).

And yeah, there's a lot to be said for the expeditiousness and Just Doin' It factor at the Happy Hacker Haven. On the other hand, murdered by real paycheck is good.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

In other words, a super-duper-marketroid term for something professionals have been doing for the past decade, anyway. When I was in a web development company we (well, the designer, anyway) would do page mockups and options to show to the client. That was in 1995.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you'll be heartened to hear that it took my former employer two or three years to do what you're trying to do. And most of that wasn't because the work was hard, it was because of "workflow".

[shechameleon.livejournal.com]

You'd probably feel more at home with JSPs. Eclipse is a huge step up from Emacs and well worth downloading.

[fivetonsflax.livejournal.com]

I would guess that the "wireframe" term was stolen from real architects by "information architects", because it sounds CADdish to me.

"Workflow" is a common and, IMHO, useful term in digital media management. As in, "Adobe Lightroom rocks because I can do my entire workflow, from importing to printing, in one program." I used to hear it a lot at Technicolor.