Web Designers who start with Photoshop

I have a big ideological beef with designers who build websites from inside Photoshop.

The web is built on a single foundation: HTML. Sure, CSS and Javascript have extended it greatly, but everything ultimately boils down to HTML. This is the lingua franca of the web.

Designers who start with Photoshop generally (and keep in mind I'm making a lot of generalizations here that don't necessarily apply to every web designer everywhere) are looking at the web the same way they look at a print brochure or flyer, and that's wrong. "Designing" for the web should take the medium into account, and I don't mean that in the sterotypical visual way. I mean that starting from HTML and building it up with CSS produces a clear, more efficient, more informed result. I mean it from the perspective of learning a foreign language by rote; repeating key phrases over and over without understanding what the individual sounds being uttered actually mean as compared to learning a language the old fashioned way; vocabulary, structure, grammar, colloquialisms, practice, practice, practice. Only someone who has done the latter can truly be fluent in a language.

The difference between graphic design and web design is specifically that there is an underlying language and grammar governing every piece of output. Some (poor) web designers get around their lack of understanding of this by producing full-page images and simply spitting out one big  tag per page. This is the most extreme example of course, but there is a whole continuum from that all the way to developers who could not make a web page look attractive to save their lives. (For the record, I'm way far down at that far end of the spectrum.)

To reiterate that point; I am not a web designer. I'm not good enough at the, "making pages look pretty," part to rightly label myself that way. I do believe though, that the sweet spot on the continuum is a solid foundation from both ends: Someone with the aesthetic tastes to make something beautiful, but that understands that the best way to do it isn't by slicing and force fitting an ill-considered PSD design into s, but building a document structure that's flexible, responsive, and subsequently easily styled with CSS.

As an application developer, these are the designers I dream of working with. Someone who can take the output of my code and, with the appropriate classes and id's, mold it into a dozen different shapes and styles.

"In 1000 words or less, describe in as much detail as you feel necessary how you would do your laundry."

(Assumes laundry equipment is in-home.) Walk all living areas, looking for loose clothing. Collect it as you go and dump it all in the hamper, which itself should be in the room where the majority of the clothes are stored (typically a bedroom). If the load is small enough, skip ahead to washing (next paragraph). Otherwise, pre-sort the hamper into like-articles (all shirts, all pants, all underwear, all "whites", all "gentle wash", etc.). If necessary, sort too-large piles into further like-article loads (jeans vs. pajama pants.) (Prepping loads in advance provides a measurement for total time the chore will take: (Number of loads * time it takes to dry a load) + time to wash first load.) If you feel the need, combine any "compatible" piles that can be combined that together will still fit in a single load. (It's better to have two types of clothing in a load and do fewer loads in all.)

Put the smallest load, or the one that can be washed the fastest, in a laundry basket, take it to the laundry room and place the load in the washer. (Save "heavy" material loads like sweaters, jeans and blankets for last.) Add soap and softener as appropriate for the load in question. Set the quickest acceptable wash cycle at the appropriate temperature and begin the cycle. Take the empty basket back to the bedroom and load it with another load. Take the full basket back to the laundry room to "stage" it. Set a timer on a device you can carry with you (a phone, typically) to match the wash cycle's length. (Now perform other activities as time allows.) When the timer goes off, return to the laundry room and move the completed load into the dryer. Add dryer sheet, set appropriate time and temperature and begin drying cycle. (Get the dryer going before beginning next wash cycle since drying typically takes longer.) Take the staged load that is waiting in the laundry room and load into the washer. Again add soap and softener, adjust the cycle appropriately for the load and start it. Set a new timer for the remaining time on the longer of the two cycles (almost always drying). (Again pursue other activities until your carried timer goes off.)

Return to the laundry room, and move the load from the dryer into the basket, but leave it by the laundry room for the time being. Transfer the completed washer load into the dryer, add dryer sheet, adjust time/temp and begin the dry cycle. (This will leave the washer momentarily empty.) Take the basket of dried clothes back to the bedroom and put away the (pre-sorted) clothes. (For example, for my own shirts this usually means laying them in a stack right-side-out and front-up, then placing hangers in the each of the whole batch before carrying the lot to the closet.) Because each load only contains similar items, putting them away should be a relatively uniform process. Once the load is fully put away, put another load from the original sorting into the basket and return with it to the laundry room. Place the load in the washer, add detergent/softener, set time/temp/cycle and begin the cycle. The washer will likely still complete before the previously-started drying cycle, but set your timer for the larger of the two and repeat this paragraph for each of the waiting piles in the bedroom.

At the point where you've put away a load of dried clothing and there are no new loads to wash, return the basket to the laundry room empty instead, but still set your alarm for the end of the final drying cycle. When it finishes, return to the laundry room, take the final dry load back to the bedroom and put it away.

This process optimizes for fewest trips to the laundry room, fewest back-and-forths between the laundry and the bedroom and minimizes the number of interactions with the washer/dryer by both pairing *and* pipelining wash/dry cycles. It also optimizes for making the process of putting clothes away as painless as possible (the part that I hate the most) by making everything in a load be the same type of clothing.