It’s a dichotomy older than the web itself: right brains and left brains, creatives and geeks, ponytails and propellerheads. However you label the two camps of web development, it is undeniable that there is often a mutual misunderstanding between them.
As Lijit’s first and only designer I am learning just how different a creative’s processes are from those of an engineer. We prioritize differently, put emphasis on different aspects of the product, and use different language (I can’t express clearly enough the terror I feel when a “design meeting” is called to discuss php classes and database integration). But those differences are what make us a great team. We are all experts in our respective disciplines and together we can make the web a better place. But it’s not always easy, there are a few things a designer should remember should they find themselves in an engineering-centric environment.

Be the Designer
Stick by your warm and fuzzy guns and make good design decisions. Engineers will often not see the benefit of hours spent scrutinizing over a page layout but it is your duty to make everything you touch both beautiful and useful.

Walk a Mile in a Geek’s Shoes
I have spent more time in a command line during the past month than I ever would have liked to. And you know what? I enjoy it. Use your nerd exposure as a learning experience. Starting Apache via terminal is a useful skill after all.

Work as One
Having access to people who are much smarter than yourself is a wonderful thing. Use the skilled programmers around you to implement functionality that you couldn’t on your own. The nature of web design has always been somewhat constraining. It’s the challenge of designing in a box that makes it fun. Developers make the box bigger.

Be Flexible
Probably the most important advice I could ever give. Be willing to sacrifice some for the good of the product. Not all your ideas can work. Use criticism to become a better designer.

I have generalized a huge spectrum of disciplines here and in no way think that there is an easy solution to group dynamics. But I do believe that recognizing and understanding our differences will ultimately make us better at what we do.

This guest post was brought to you by Mike Bucks, one of our newest employees at Lijit and a wonderful addition to the team. Besides bringing his design sensibilities to the table, he’s also good for music recommendations and spur-of-the-moment badges.

One of our publishers took a trip and was kind enough to bring us along. Here is Calamity Jen strolling around the International Market Place in Honolulu. It helps us all to sleep at night knowing that someone is doing the hard job of evangelizing in Hawaii when our CEO isn’t there.

On April 1st (no foolin’), Lijit celebrated a milestone around our office. We hit a million page views that day and couldn’t wait to share our success with the rest of the Boulder startup community. At our CEO’s insistence, an impromptu party was thrown together to fully commemorate the event. Tweets went out and at the appointed time, we had about 20 people gathered in our office to help us with all the extra alcohol that we had sitting around the kitchen.

We marked the occasion with a shot and it was decided that when we hit 2 million, there will be two shots. Yikes. After the fact, we realized that it was also a very informal office warming, since we never actually had one of those. (You can see a video of the office tour that Todd gave to Colorado Startups here.) It was a fun time and good chance to say thanks to the folks that have helped us along the way.

And a big thanks go out to one of our newest Lijit publishers and the bearer of delicious tidings…Cupcakes Take The Cake. Besides posting pictures of amazing cupcakes, they also have a directory of where to buy cupcakes all over the country. You won’t find too many recipes, but I don’t find that problematic because sometimes, you just want to look at a cupcake. (Tends to be the lower calorie option as well…) We are excited to be helping out cupcake aficionados everywhere by providing a valuable search tool that serves up relevant and tasty results. Check out their blog for immediate help with sweet tooth cravings!

Today is BlogDay, the day set aside for celebrating blogs. (Although really, isn’t that every day?) From the site…

“BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest…This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.”

We here at Lijit love blogs of all kinds and encourage you to do your part by participating in BlogDay. Barney posted his contribution, Daniel gave his thoughts, and I wrote a little something for the event as well. If you have the opportunity today, try to read a blog that you normally wouldn’t. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller…It’s a big blog world out there and if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, something may just pass you by.