Thinking about web design skills
Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about how web designers work together. Most of these collaborations, in my experience, occur informally. A few people get together and start dividing up their work to move a project forward.
But where do I fit in? What skills do I bring to the table? What skills do I want my partners to have?
More importantly, how do you identify what you are looking for in new people when it is evident that the team needs to grow?
One approach I've been considering lately is to map individuals skills to a "T" shape. The wide top represents multiple areas of competance and the descender(s) represent areas of deep knowledge and skill.
I, like most web designers, call upon a wide variety of skills but not all equally. Some I have more experience with, like strategic thinking, problem solving, interacting with clients, etc. For others their deepest skill might be unit testing or abstracting problems to help structure a programmed solution.
I'm still working on this way of thinking about things but will post some graphics as I move more toward trying to actually map out this model.
How do you think about your skills and how you share them with your colleagues? How do you know what you need to fill out a project team? Are there skills that everyone should possess regardless of specialization?
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Who is this guy?
There is an old business saying, when you take on a project think "who" first, then what. You still need the what, otherwise no success, but who turns out to be really important. In many cases "what" can be learned along the way.