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Do you think it would have worked out if you skipped the grueling and tedious discussions entirely?
by qznc 9mo ago
Do you think it would have worked out if you skipped the grueling and tedious discussions entirely?
- temporallobe 9mo agoI definitely needed the initial input from the stakeholders as to what they wanted and why, but it turned into pointless bickering about colors and many disagreements about symbol meanings - for example should a dropped pin have a shadow? Should it be pin or a baloon-like thingy? Should it lean left or right? How does one represent a “duty station” when there is no previous iconography or other kind of standard around this? It also led to a lot of design-by-committee meetings where well-intentioned people suggested good ideas but things were always left at some ambiguous action item that never had any follow through. This took months and I kept re-rendering the icon set (which were all multi-layer SVGs) and then pasting the PNG renderings into a Word doc because that’s how they wanted to review them. What this did teach me was to create very efficient workflows. I had all the Inkscape keystrokes memorized and found out they had an API that allowed me to create some level of automation (things like batch conversations IIRC). I kept certain symbols as separate base/template images so I could quickly swap things in and out. I had separate color files with swatches of various color themes, all in hexadecimal. Since I was and am fundamentally a software engineer, I used those engineering processes and principles to make it more like a typical software project than just a collection of images.