I probably shouldn’t be writing this a 3:00 in the AM so I’ll try to be brief. There are times in the course of my work when it becomes evident that I am destined to be a programmer, I am purposed to be a programmer, that I AM a programmer. Even though this is for the most part encouraging, it is often packaged with a sour note. I think about whether or not it was a waste of time coming to art school to learn design if all I want to do, all I CAN do (in reference to will not ability), is program. But then there are nights like tonight, when I was working on a page of my project where users would populate their skills. I finally setup an efficient dialog between the PHP in my Drupal module and jQuery’s AJAX method. However, this isn’t all I was working on. I could not stop myself from tweeking the HTML and CSS of the selection boxes. I was changing borders, positions and the colors of classification. I also found myself making notes in my moleskin pad of how my SQL databases communicate with each other, and the context-specific forms I intended to create to gather more information. I was changing the buttons and the feedback of the system. All of this is a natural part of developing a project like this, but what I found perplexing was the fact that I was doing all of this simultaneously. I didn’t have to turn off my “Programming Brain” to turn on my “Visual Design Brain”, or turn of that to turn on my “Interface Design Brain”. There was just a “Design Brain” that took advantage of the interconnectedness of the programming, the visual, the interface and the information design.

Maybe I’m not supposed to be doing all of this at the same time. Sure, the color of the borders and the text describing a form element can wait, but I can’t shut up that Design Brain that says, “I can’t make this without understanding this, and I can’t understand this without seeing it.” The Designer Brain wants to see and click and type through the body of a user who is not simply a disembodied finger but a human being. My education in Multimedia has given me a passion for this. Or maybe it realized a passion that was already there. I have often compared programming to breathing for my life. It can be fatal if I try to resist. But tonight I realized designing interfaces circulates the blood through my veins, good information design runs my kidneys, and a healthy visual design keeps my liver intact (unless I’m drinking). Okay, I’m going to stop this analogy, before it’s too late.

I thank God for leading me where I am today, because I AM where I am supposed to be.
…at least for the next two and a half months. THEN I am supposed to be somewhere else.