What software developers should know about design

摘要： Facebook designer turned angel investor Soleio discusses how software design needs a ‘tool-driven revolution’ and what makes design teams and technology startups successful.

Soleio is a software designer turned investor. As a former fund manager and now angel investor, he has backed some of the most successful tech startups of the last few years including Figma, Vanta, and Vercel

Soleio has a background in design, including work at Facebook and Dropbox where he led early design efforts. I spoke to him about his experiences designing for the early web, how successful technology companies approach design, his involvement with Figma and Vercel, and how a career in software design led to a career in investing.

Matthew Tyson: As a programmer, I have to admit that design is something of a dark art to me. I know good design when I encounter it, and I can build all of the logical structures to back it, but that’s it. Can you tell me what a developer should know about good design and how you developed a passion for it?

Soleio: Sure thing. I got my start over my high school summers as an intern working on an alumni magazine. That job introduced me to desktop publishing—the end-to-end process of coming up with content, producing visual and written media, then editing and laying it all out for print.

Later in college I parlayed that work experience into web development thanks to a borrowed copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, a tool that introduced website creation to designers familiar with desktop publishing. I fell in love with creating things for the internet and spent my nights and weekends teaching myself HTML, Flash, and later CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

My passion for design sprang from studying and reverse-engineering the work of other people designing web experiences. People like Joshua Davis and Dan Cederholm.

In particular, I was fascinated with the emergence of web apps. At the time, it seemed that distributing software via the browser was going to be the next big phase of consumer technology. After Google announced Gmail, one of the earliest examples of this transition, I decided to move to San Francisco to try my hand at being an independent designer and developer.文

轉貼自： infoworld.com

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