What makes Todd Little tick

A little bit of background

I’ve been a student of visual design for over a decade. I say student, of course, because the lessons keep changing as the medium evolves. It seems, even as the fundamentals stay the same, the tools which we use to deliver those fundamentals are constantly in flux.

I’ve been working on the web for around seven years now. I try to use my design background to balance my approach to development, but I’d almost always rather focus on the moving parts behind the scenes. When it comes to design I much prefer the problem solving aspects over the visual styling aspects. But it’s really all a matter of the comfort zone, and getting out of it.

How and why I do what I do

I still work on the occasional brochure site for friends, family, etc, but for the most part I work in a Ruby on Rails environment for medium sized start-ups and TLC products. For markup, I prefer HAML. It’s quicker for me to write and read than HTML, and the output is just plain beautiful. For styling I prefer SASS. I have a very specific approach to writing my mix-ins and site wide style framework that really works for me. I’ll link to the blog post about that here when it goes up. For Javascript, the best fit for me has been jQuery over the other libraries I’ve used like Prototype and YUI.

The perfect gig

Just like anyone else, I prefer to work on things that challenge me, where there is a lot of trust and ownership. In my experience, if you’re collaborating well on a project, it’s going to be more successful. This of course extends much further than a designer working with a developer to make the pages look pretty. What I mean here is a culture, a place where the word team is more than just decoration on the title of a memo. This is a place where almost everyone could do each others work, but they just do their own better. This is a place where everyone is aware of how each other work, and use that knowledge in their own approaches.

Full disclosure

I like to play devil’s advocate a lot. This happens from the technical side, the business side, and the visual side. It’s a gift. In all seriousness, I make every attempt to look at each aspect of an application from as many angles as possible. This often includes the end user who wants things to be attractive and usable, a developer who wants things to be efficient and reliable, and a stakeholder who wants things to be profitable.

I can be very opinionated

That’s not always a bad thing. I keep an open mind on new technologies, and new uses of old ones, but I still have a preferred workflow and a few random, and maybe crazy ideas.

For instance, I don’t really care for jQueryUI Themes at all, however, I think the basic functionality of the widget factory is very nice. CSS is the poor man’s SASS is the rich man’s CSS. Seriously, if you don’t know SASS, learn it. I absolutely believe Getting Real is the right approach for 80% of startups.

There are many random tangents to be explored in many random blog posts. So keep an eye out.