Micha Goldfine | Design & Vision    

As with many young start-ups, design is not a top priority certainly not a dedicated design team. Fortunately times are changing (fast) and design, driven by User Experience Design (UXD) has become a crucial part in the success of tech companies.   

Distribution and tables based applications are not ‘sexy’ by any means. They probably fall in the same bucket of many other administrative applications and tools. So how does a design team approach something that might look simple on the surface but actually is very complex under the hood?    

Learn, adapt and evolve. You are also responsible for a successful user experience.
Software is a tool, a tool that needs to be learned and experimented with. Since the move to cloud-based software and mobile apps, changes and updates appear more often then in the past and users must adapt quickly as well.   

It’s been a a few years since the term “responsive design" has entered the overwhelming world of tech terms, titles and acronyms. I prefer using the term ‘layout’ rather then’ design as we are not altering the design but rather changing the layout to fit a certain screen (viewport to be exact) size and/ or orientation.   

In recent years with the introduction of more digital devices and the increase of data-streams I started skipping some traditional planing and scoping steps as I realised that most clients and stakeholders simply 'get it' much better if I graphically illustrate my thoughts rather then verbally describing them or showing some black and white wireframes.   

I was never a big fan of SVG or any 'new' formats that where not widely supported both by the recipient (browsers) and authors (Illustrator etc.). 
Now that IE9+, Firefox, Chrome and Safari support the SVG format I started creating vector assets for both CSS and content and find SVG to be a very flexible (literally) format alongside PNG and icon fonts.   

It’s no surprise that Adobe decided to drop future releases of Fireworks. It’s one of those applications you wished will continue to evolve, but I think the entire Fireworks community knew for quite a while that Fireworks life-support system had to be turned off eventually.    

SCSS is a great way to produce clean and quick CSS files. Using a SCSS framework such as Compass makes it even easier and quicker to produce not only clean CSS files but also compatible with the various browser's engines and latest HTML 5 syntax.   

For many in the web industry the title”Front-End Developer” is well known but for many recruiters, agencies, HR professionals and general public the title is unknown or they simply do no understand what it means.