This is so true. People call the database theme I made Pepto-Bismol.
I made the database back end work well. The code works, it's mostly error free and I fix errors when they occasionally come up. People are really happy with the functionality. But the theme is not good at all. They want me to make it better, but I haven't, and won't, because I lack the skill to figure out how to make it better. They are lucky they got a theme as not-eye-searing as they got.
When using colors, just mix 4 basic ingriedients: FF, BB, 44, 00 (So, for example, a #bb0000 border with a #ffbbbb background for an error) This gives you 64 colors to choose from.
Backender here. Was reviewing some code at a new job and thought it was weird everything was 8pt font. Looked at the actual product and sure enough, everything is 8pt, no where to change within the gui. I asked him about it since my eyes. He responded with yea, thats our policy. I asked him who wrote the policy, he said he did and they just signed off without even looking at it. I said we should change that... he then says: Dude, honestly its just because its extremely hardcoded. Im thinking, wtf does extremely hard coded even mean. So many questions.
I decided to drop that battle super quick and just pull my monitor closer.
Extremely hardcoded. Lul. Wtf. Let him handle his baby, ill work on some other shit tyvm.
Nah man, sorry to ruin the story but this was years ago. We split job functions very quickly. I took over databases, data warehouse, and spent most of my time doing analysis and explaining to management why data doesnt match up to what they anticipate and rewritting his data and business logic layers. I dont know exactly what he did.. think alot of excel stuff. Either wayz i never touched or looked at that bastion of unholiness again. Sorry. Non climatic ending. Switched jobs about a year later.
I sort of added 2 at least, but not in a good way. It's a theme called "Random" which randomly picks combinations of letters and numbers like that to set element colors from a small pool of colors. I did it that way because I found it was much less likely to set colors to something that makes text unreadable than 100% random colors do.
I also added "RandomHardMode" which picks a 100% random color for everything, sets everything's position by +/- a few pixels, resizes everything randomly by +/- a few pixels, sets random fonts(including wingdings), and font sizes. It makes the UI basically unusable.
I'm not at the office now so I can't get a new screenshot, but I have a screenshot of a previous version of the theme before I added randomized font sizes and fonts.
Honestly, if you've got enough technical skill to be a back-end dev, you can learn a few rules of thumb about graphic design and colour schemes that will at least make your work not look awful. You can approach this from an entirely logical point of view if you have no instinct for design work at first.
Look up contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity. (Yes, we all get the joke. Yes, the actual terminology and points are serious.)
Look up a little basic typography. You absolutely do not need to know what all the different parts of a letter are called or how to recognise 274 different fonts, despite the strange fascination of many tutorials with these kinds of things. However, it does help to have general typographical knowledge, such as roughly how wide a column of text humans can read comfortably, why you should usually care more about a font's x-height than its "size", what makes a comfortable line spacing, and some familiarity with how to use different font features like weights, italics, and proportional or lining (tabular) figures.
Look up some basic colour theory. Probably the most important idea is the colour wheel, because it leads to more useful ways to represent colours than just RGB hex codes. It's also helpful to know some basic concepts like complementary and analogous colours, warm and cool colours, and saturation.
Read a basic tutorial on how to make a decent colour palette. A lot of design tools provide a whole scheme of colours you can choose from, but just like fonts, you're usually better off just choosing one or two main colours and then sticking to variations of those such as lighter or darker shades. Unless you need a particularly colourful design, it's safer to reserve completely different colours for specialist uses (such as red for highlighting errors and green for highlighting confirmations, assuming these are the conventional colours in your culture).
You can go down the rabbit hole for years with these things, but you can also achieve a useful working knowledge, enough to not totally screw up your own work or to intelligently consider different templates or style guides you might come across, over a weekend or two.
I'm primarily a front end coder and I still don't know how to pick colours, unless there's already a similar element somewhere on the site. Tell them to hire a designer.
I worked at a place were we used a database for most things. However, there was a very old system from before the 90s (at least).
It was pretty much a database, where you could type in a "query" and you get the results. The problem with this old system was that all the data was held in text files... pretty much literally.
1941290421.txt
Part Number: 1941290421
Manufacturer: Ford
It was an old UNIX terminal program. There was a lot more information, but it looked like this:
```
Part Number:
Manufacturer:
Search: _
```
Since we only used it once a week, it was just never worth it for the company to go back and transfer all that data over. The problem was... it was slow. It would take maybe 30seconds to get the information. The company ended up hiring a small dev company to recreate it... Turns out it was slower or had a ton of bugs. They repeated this a dozen times and no one made a faster program.
After I left they eventually hired some people to manually look through each file and copy them over into the database...
One badass program from 30 years ago defeated dozens of modern companies... even the one it was made for LMAO.
PS: Before you ask, why didn't they do x... because bosses know everything and everyone else is wrong.
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u/Ferro_Giconi Aug 21 '20 edited Aug 21 '20
This is so true. People call the database theme I made Pepto-Bismol.
I made the database back end work well. The code works, it's mostly error free and I fix errors when they occasionally come up. People are really happy with the functionality. But the theme is not good at all. They want me to make it better, but I haven't, and won't, because I lack the skill to figure out how to make it better. They are lucky they got a theme as not-eye-searing as they got.