[plug] Learning PHP advice

[Daniel Foote]

> It's interesting you say that actually because I was thinking the same
> thing, only a few months ago.  I'm in no way a designer (or an
> arty/design minded person), but after being in the position of
> completing several projects on my own, design and all, I've been getting
> into it more and more recently.
>
> I've always been interested in Photoshop, but its only in the past few
> months that I've started learning "the little things" that go into
> design, especially in web format (things like correct gradients and
> shading on borders, buttons etc etc).  Once again, I'm no designer, but
> with a little bit of practise, I've found that I've been able to make
> page designs that are fairly good to look at, and still serve the same
> purpose as a functional web application.
>
> When it comes down to it, I'm a backend person (in a development sense
> of course), I'll always prefer the grunt work, with the code and
> database manipulation, but being able to do the design as well, I've
> found extremely rewarding.

Ah! So I'm not the only one! The stuff I come up with is generally not
"hard on the eyes" but isn't really pretty. I've come to realise that
I can't lay it out, although people disagree with me (in terms of me
saying that I can't really learn).

I have two mates who are right up there with the design aspect of it,
and also fully understand the (HTML/CSS) code and how to make it work.

In another project I did recently, I just wrote the code and some very
crude display. The code was fine - worked very well. I had one of my
mates go over the layout afterwards - just a matter of him editing the
templates - and in about 30 minutes he went from ugly to a very clean,
neat, minimalistic design that looked great.

In my case, I'll just get help when the design is really important. At
least I (usually) realise when this is the case...

Daniel.