We sat down this week on Digital Dialogue with our creative director at Yelling Mule, Nicki. She has been the creative director for the last three years and is an absolute vital part of the team.

Graphic designers are highly touted for their abilities to create visually stunning parts of sites but also to make them functional for the user. Here at Yelling Mule, Nicki wears many hats, but one of the most integral things she does after getting a clients design off the ground is kicking things off in front end.

A lot of people, including myself and Katelyn were confused as to what exactly front end was and Nicki gave a similar analogy using a car to this one on Skillcrush.com using a city as an example,

“The back end developer is like the engineer who designs and creates the systems that make a city work (electricity, water and sewer, zoning, etc.), while the front end developer is the one who lays out the streets and makes sure everything is connected.”

Nicki explained to us how in her position she has the ability to oversee all the creative that we put out from design to front end to the site when it’s complete and fully coded in back end making sure everything looks like it is supposed to.

Being extremely proficient in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript also helps Nicki see the big picture while coding the site, which leads us to communication at this point in the development.

“It’s important to write clean code, which seems kind of obvious, but very legible, indenting things properly, because I know that someone else is going to be looking at that after me. I’ll also write a lot of comments within the code to our back end developers saying that this needs to be here, etc.” It’s important to have communication within the departments at a company and Nicki’s’ attention to detail is paramount in front end.

In conclusion Nicki said that it’s important to,“Stay up to date on what is happening in coding, techniques, and what’s trending. Just be open to trying new things and Google everything! Even when I’m building sites now, I still am Googling just because you never know when a new a technique that might make it easier to view sites in a browser might pop up!”.

We will continue to track the development process here at Yelling Mule and next week look out for another installment of Digital Dialogue. To find more blogs similar to this check out here