Our design partner, Jon Follett will be conducting the workshop “Visual Design for Web Sites and Web Apps” for UPA Boston on Saturday, August 01, 2009 from 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM (ET). If you’re a developer looking for some design orientation, I think this would be a great opportunity for you to gain some knowledge.

If you’re a designer looking to refine your skills on the web, Jon is excellent at his craft in addition to being a great teacher.

So join in on the event. I’m sure you’ll take some learnings home with you. Registration

under_construction is a jQuery plugin that hides or overlays elements of a design that have not been implemented yet. The best part is that it is done completely with standards compliant markup and unobtrusive JavaScript.

This utility works extremely well in Agile environments where there is design work done upfront. I use it extensively and clients really appreciate the ability to see what’s done and not done in a new application.

In this update:

• improved namespacing – no more collisions. To update, your function calls must be of the form $.under_construction.<function name>
• improved opacity – Due to some functions that were recently made available in the latest versions of jQuery, I was able to restructure the overlay so you get a cleaner look over darker backgrounds.

See the demo for more details.

In the future, I’m hoping to add iteration/sprint labels to the overlays so the client or stakeholder can see at what point the feature is going to be built.

Jon Follett and I led a discussion on how designers can integrate with Agile development teams at a recent Refresh Boston event.

I’ve really come to enjoy and look forward to Refresh Boston events. The Microsoft NERD Center is a killer venue, and Patrick Haney (notasausage) does a great job in getting a diverse crowd and stellar speakers.

Of course, Jon did a tremendous job with designing the slides for the presentation

If you attended the talk, please rate and comment on us over at SpeakerRate. We definitely want to continue the learning and discussion around this topic.

I might be getting a little geeky on everyone here, but I have to share something very important to programmers. I recently noticed this in a recent Rails project I was working on (method names changed to protect the guilty)

def do_something_really_important
  #lots of complicated implementation

  rescue ApplicationError
end

Why is this some of the worst code I’ve ever seen? If something unintended goes wrong the developers would be none the wiser. Nor the potential user for that matter. If this is a crucial method this really could have disastrous effects.

Defensive design is great when it comes to exception handling, but make sure you are handle for specific exceptions intentionally. Also if you’re catching an exception, actually do something! Email an admin, log the error – create some way for the developers to get insight on what is happening. In other words, if you’re expecting a “File Not Found Error”, do this instead:

def do_something_really_important
  #lots of complicated implementation

  rescue FileNotFoundError
    #actually do something useful
end

It’s not rocket science – it is good design. Good design is what separates architects from hackers.