Design Development & the Pursuit of Happiness » Team Development

Making A Name For Yourself

Aaron Irizarry — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:44:31 +0000

As I have been getting settled into my job, and enjoying our new team I am very excited to see the changes and improvements we are making to our products and the experience our users have as they engage them. As we work on these improvements it has become apparent that many of us on [...]

Design Rules to Live By #7

Aaron Irizarry — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:55:42 +0000

This weeks design rule to live by has has to do with maintaining a balanced workload. It can be very easy) especially when we are starting out in the design/dev field to take as much work as we can get our hands on. Which initially sounds good so that we can build a strong portfolio. [...]

Design Rules to Live By #6

Aaron Irizarry — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:00:16 +0000

This weeks “Design Rule to Live By”, has to do with taking criticism, constructive or not, and using it in a way to improve and expand our skill set. Criticism is a very large part of the design world. Sometimes is comes in the form of constructive criticism that is offered from a knowledgeable source [...]

Design Rules to Live By #5

Aaron Irizarry — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:18:05 +0000

This weeks design rule to live by, can be one of the most crucial lessons learned in design relationships. Interacting with clients, and fellow team members while working in house, can provide many opportunities for disagreement/ differences of opinion on projects.The key to skillfully navigating our way through these disagreements / differences is to… Know [...]

Design Rules to Live By #3

Aaron Irizarry — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:32:23 +0000

This weeks design rule has to do with client/dev team relationships, and dealing with questions and revision requests… Challenge changes you don’t agree with, doing so pragmatically , and objectively This is not a call to arms, nor am I in any way endorsing snooty, arrogant, designer attitudeness (yes attitudeness is a word cause I [...]

Design Rules to Live By #2

Aaron Irizarry — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:48:06 +0000

Design Rule #2 has to do with communication… not just the fact that we need to, but that we need to proactively. Communication is our biggest ally in completing successful projects… Keep the lines of communication open with those involved in the project to catch any mid project scope changes, and even more importantly understand [...]

5 Disciplines of Successful Design

Aaron Irizarry — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:28:24 +0000

I recently read a good article about “raising up your design I the way it should go”. It drew parallels between raising children and producing good mature products/designs. One of the things in the article that struck me was the concept of discipline. The article really didn’t go in depth into discipline but provided some good talking points about discipline and design. The more I unpacked these concepts, the more I saw their value in my everyday approach to design and or development. I have broken them down into five bite sized pieces… yum!

Friday Vidcast 4-03-09

Aaron Irizarry — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:33:28 +0000

So in this weeks Vidcast I talk about my new project www.onecss.com I am really excited about this as it is a great opportunity to build a community. Keep checking back for updates. I also talk about one of the recent posts... [read more]

Building a Successful Development Team pt.4 – Wrap Up

Aaron Irizarry — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:45:57 +0000

So as we wrap up this series on building a successful development team you will see that there is one major underlying factor that runs through each topic that we discussed. {read more}

Conflict and Team Development

Aaron Irizarry — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:37:50 +0000

Building a Successful Development Team Pt.3 - Dealing with Conflict from Aaron Irizarry on Vimeo. We have looked at how to write code that is easy for our development team to pick up and use (and in so doing fueling efficiency, and better teamwork), then we looked at communication between team members, and some of the tools we can use to help facilitate effective team communication. In part 3 of this series we are going to look at dealing with conflict in a development team environment.