Mint Digital

Mint's participating in the annual CSS Naked Day again. The idea is that there are two basic layers to what your browser shows you: the content, and the presentation (i.e., the design). Once a year, web developers worldwide show solidarity by temporarily disabling the presentation layer. We do this to remind ourselves that, as with all industries, you can't build a shoddy product and just dress it up—build it intelligently from the start, and the rest will fall into place.

We use this general technique to streamline user interface development:

1. Figure out what the users want, and the simplest possible way for them to find it.
2. Build some prototype wireframes. Here, we write the HTML for the site's content, and not consider the design just yet. To make this content presentable, we start with our in-house CSS framework, which lets us build wireframes very rapidly.
3. Once we have a design in mind, we write CSS to go with our HTML. If the design changes, no need to revisit the HTML in the previous step—we just replace our CSS.

We pay close attention to every detail during each step, even though the end user will never have a clue. Our early efforts let us polish the user interface more easily and efficiently, and with quality results.

And no, none of us are actually naked. (As far as I know.)