I am an information designer, that is somebody who usually works on documents that need to be understood clearly by users. Information designers use their visual and editorial abilities, along with some knowledge of reading and comprehension and a dash of design rigour, to do their work. They focus on users’ needs above all. Additional skills are useful, though.
DTP
I have DTP production experience and I’ve used software from Publisher and Quark to Ovation Pro and structured FrameMaker. I can get pretty good results in Word, too, but I am not a Word macro savant. I know my way around Photoshop and Illustrator. I’ve drawn type using Fontographer and FontForge – but generally for pleasure rather than profit.
Scripting and system administration
My software coding skills are modest, but include the ability to engage with the scripting languages that form the basis of all interactivity on the web (such as Perl, Python and Javascript). I can write and understand SQL and I have specified, set up and maintained sites running Apache, Zope, MySQL, PostGres, PHP and so on. I know my way around the command line and I am pretty comfortable on any UNIX-like operating system. Although I am not a software professional I have enough insight to be able to work closely with programmers and understand some of the problems they face. I can bridge the worlds of editorial, visual and software, translating the needs and worries of the various parties into terms others, such as clients and project managers, can understand.
Designing for the web
I am a keen advocate of open standards like HTML and CSS over proprietary/binary presentation formats (like Flash). The open formats are often restrictive for designers, so I feel the pain of my colleagues who wish for more. But focusing on systems that are centred around visual presentation can be a weakness in a world in which accessibility is considered a basic requirement. And the semantic web – a vision of the web in which structure and meaning extend right the way from the server to the elements of a sentence and enables computer agents to help humans in an intelligent way, rather than simply by the blind force of googling – is more than a pipe dream. I am proficient in writing HTML code and I also have lots of experience in designing web layouts and translating them from visuals into finished code.