A Startup A Day

Only four more days until the season premiere of Lost.  My predictions?  Kate is pregnant with Sawyer’s baby, Mikhail isn’t really dead, and after ever episode people are going to rush online to cleverly complain that “this is the episode that Lost has finally jumped the shark“.  I, for one, cannot wait.

Today’s idea is based on the simple fact that the role of designer and developer is becoming more and more blurred as designers move online and developers finally get Steve Job’s memo on the importance of good design.  My idea is a dual website called “D4D”.  One side is a set of tutorials about learning design that is geared towards developers (Design 4 Devs).  The other side is a set of tutorials about learning web development that is geared towards designers (Dev 4 Designers). 

If you think about it, if you’re writing a book about development techniques, who is your target audience?  Developers, of course.  So you target your writing style towards technical readers with a development or engineering background.  However, designers have such a different background and mindset than developers, so it seems like there’s an opportunity to instead target the design community with a series of artfully-designed development tutorials.  And conversely, the design articles could explore the mathematical side of design (color theory, for example) and focus on the technical aspects of aesthetics that would appeal to your everyday developer.  Along with building out the website and generating advertising revenue, this could also become a solid brand that could expand offline into a series of instructional books.

Look who’s back!  Steve was the original inspiration for this blog back in the day, great to have him back in the game.