As a matter of helping friends, I found myself doing frontend, backend and deployment of a new social media system, called Sketchpoetic. Sketchpoetic is the brainchild of Sheila Darcey. Her idea is to have users make sketches that reflect how they feel. Using an SVG-style tree/cloud, users can then explore various sketches that people have made, and what feelings they invoked.
It’s an interesting journey, kind of a masterclass of understanding how to deal with inconsistent designers and their wishes, and how they change things. Often, developers fear this, and demand some sort of certainty, but fact of the matter is, it doesn’t have to be so bad. If your designer understands flexibility and what is possible, you can all help each other create a better product.
HTML, CSS and Javascript have come a long way since the early days, so being smart while transforming the ideas into code, is definitely a lot easier than it used to be.
I’ll post a link to the site when the project is ready. Stay tuned!