Reuse & Recycle Your Work

People working in field of computers and Information Technology, from hard code programmers & dedicated network engineers to creative graphic designers, all will agree with this statement: Reuse and Recycle.

Now, what does it mean by reuse and recycle? Let’s take an example from a view of a designer. He has been handed a project to design the GUI for an online games portal. Logos, color scheme and content have been provided. Out of sheer habit, he opens his favorite layout software and starts to visualize the layout. For reference, he goes through many other sites dealing in online games and stuff.

Here an experienced designer will certainly go into details like navigation structure, usability issues, target audience, media to be used (flash, html), etc for that particular project. By knowing these things, he may start his work in the same software the previous artists had chosen but with few distinct differences. This artist knows that his site will be accessed more by viewers having 1024 * 768 screen resolution or more, 90% of them will be equipped with flash players and incase of downloading the plugin, 75% or more do have a broadband connection.

The artist now thinks more like a flash designer than a graphic designer. He is reusing his past experience for future work. He is a clever guy. He has already made templates with basic dimensions separately made for different screen resolutions. He opens one of them, saves this as a new file called "GameNFame.com", and now calls all his creative juices to work. Once he is through with the design, he even has template CSS ready for changing the look of the browser scrollbars. He simply has to change few color codes and he has a page ready for it’s first test ride.

Let’s take another example of a programmer. An ASP programmer. He is been told to code a simple contact form with 9 odd text fields and 2 drop-downs which on submission by the user must reach xyz@nowhere.com

To start off, let’s assume this guy is not so experienced programmer yet he is a clever guy. He has access to one of the previous forms made in ASP by other programmer. He simply saves the file as "newform.asp" and changes the field names, delete and adds new fields, if necessary and pastes the design below the main ASP code and viola! His page is ready to rock n’ roll. This is recycling the work.

Though above two examples may sound simple, basic and very much used by people around the globe, the same formula if used in more complex and time consuming jobs, can save hours of work in a single day. For instance, recording and creating "Actions" in Photoshop saves plenty of time if the job involves scanning hundreds of photographs, applying "Sharpen" effects to files, etc.

If you study the WYSIWYG editors available today, you will understand that they do the same thing. Templates are all ready for different files like HTML, CSS, XHTML, PHP, etc and a programmer gets the basic code ready when he opens the software and a new file.

Today’s world is filled with templates. Nobody has the time to wait and wonder. If you know what you require, then don’t wait, simply grab a template and get to work. It’s too bad, there are no such templates to write an article.