We are all trained in the classic design skills – making sure we don’t just take pride in what we’re doing.
In this episode of the Designing Dudes podcast I interview a former member of the design team at the game world’s most famous company, DBAg.
The guys talk a lot about the DBAg design team and how they made a very big impact in the industry. The question was about how can we train designers at a smaller company to make as big a difference as the big guys. I think the answer is that you need to have a clear understanding of the company, understand the industry, and do a lot of studying.
If you’re a designer at a small company, it’s very easy to be on your own and make it look pretty. If you have a clear definition of what you do and you spend more time studying the games, you can make it look good. But if you don’t have a clear definition of what you do and you spend more time researching companies, you’re going to end up with a bunch of design jobs that nobody really cares about.
Ive been working at a company for over 6 months now, and its really hard to understand the industry and the company. I just got out of my first interview and I feel like I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I feel like I’m the only one in the room that doesn’t know what the hell I’m doing or why I’m doing it. It’s frustrating. I know what I need to know.
One interview question that really resonated with me is, “What do you know about db design?” And the answer is, a lot. I know that the world of database design is huge and I think its a field ripe for some innovative and creative thinking.
The most basic and common way for a database to be designed is to use a relational model of data. But even that is just one model, and it has many variations. Different databases use different variations, and there are a whole host of different ones out there. What we can do is focus on the basic database model and see what we can do with that.
The basic database model is a list of tables, each representing a specific category of data. That is the model we have at the very beginning. But not all databases use the same model. A lot of them are relational in nature. Some are even object-relational. But all databases are relational in one way or another.
There are different ways to store data, and how you store it can affect how it is represented and how it is stored. For example, in a relational database you would have a table, which represents a particular category of data. And then you can also have a table for each individual item. If you were to store a person’s address, you would have a table for each address.
The same thing applies to databases. For example, you might have a database of recipes. Each recipe is represented as a table with a certain number of attributes. And then there’s the recipe itself, which is represented as another table with one row per item.
