Designing Together: The collaboration and conflict management handbook for creative professionals

2. The Designer Mindset

The first book I wrote (Communicating Design) is about design documentation–the collection of artifacts designers produce as they design software or Web site interfaces. At the time I conceived the book, I thought the topic pretty harmless.

Since then, however, design documentation has experienced a backlash. Different attitudes have emerged, with some Web designers believing that any kind of formal documentation is harmful to the design process. Other Web designers find themselves in circumstances where they couldn’t survive without formal artifacts.

As I watched this “controversy” unfold, I thought that the Web design community was missing the point. The vitriol directed at the artifacts (and the people who used them) ...