Roles and Responsibilities

In order for the UI team to be effective, we need to spin it off into its own separate entity and give it the power to modify the code base and make improvements. It doesn't make sense for that team to rely heavily on Bharat, since he's hard at work on the application framework and is prone to get very busy. It's better if the UI team has the ability to reach a consensus, make decisions and enact them. So let me outline some of the roles that we need to fill in order to get this team up to speed, then we can figure out who will fill those roles. Post follow-ups and indicate what kind of role you're interested in (or suggest a new role) below.

TEAM LEADER

The team leader is in charge of coordinating the work done by the team. The leader does not have to do the work him or herself unless so desired, but it's imperative that the leader knows what work is happening and can help team members to focus on the right parts of the project. This team member must have the following skills:

<LI> A solid understanding of User Interface design
<LI> The ability to coordinate a design team and help them come to a consensus, make decisions
<LI> The ability to track changes and maintain some form of a schedule so that interested parties (namely myself) can be kept abreast of progress.
<LI> Staying power. This person must be committed to the team for a period of at least 6 months to 1 year; we can't have a lot of turnover of the person in charge
<LI> Project management experience is a major plus here.

GRAPHIC DESIGNER(S)

The graphic designers are in charge of coming up with artwork and color schemes for use in Gallery's core templates and in the themes. This team member must have the following skills:

<LI> Ability to work with others to come up with a set of artistic paradigms which we can employ all over the product
<LI> Ability to work with and improve on an artistic paradigm that was created by another graphic designer
<LI> Ability to create tools that help less gifted folks create graphics (like button makers, etc) a big plus.
<LI> Understanding of the Smarty templating engine so that they can create new themes is a big plus.

UI DESIGNER(S)

These team members must have the following skills:

<LI> Ability to design new interfaces for existing functionality
<LI> Ability to refactor and improve existing interfaces
<LI> Understanding of the Smarty templating engine so that they can create new templates
<LI> Understanding of PHP so that they can create new layouts is a plus

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I fall in the catagory as Graphic Designer. I looked over the Smarty Template system and have worked with simular templating before. Smarty is an excellent choice, it makes the UI very modular and easy to change. And I could help out creating new templates.

=)
Jade

Well, my skills are quite broad, I would say I can be a combination of UI designer and artist. I'm more of a UI designer, as I have PHP and HTML knowledge. I haven't worked with Smarty yet, but I'm happy with templating engines, and tend to use PhpBB2's template engine as it's so simple. However, being a PHP coder, I can pickup any other template formats quickly. I wouldn't say I'm as hot with graphics, although I'm happy to make some skins/designs for bits as needed. I'm happy to fit in wherever needed.