Cheat Sheets

Are cheat sheets beneficial to you designers? So people will say no, while others may say yes. As a designer should you use cheat sheets?

After finding an article about cheat sheets, I got to thinking, are there any negative effects of using cheat sheets? Of course the first one that I thought of was that as a designer you should really learn the syntax of the language you are designing/coding with. Cheat sheets can become a crutch which in the long run may hurt you as a designer. Another negative effect of using a cheat sheet is security issues. When using languages such as PHP, ASP, and other web based languages a cheat sheet does not provide any information on how secure the syntax is list is. It can provide information on how secure it is via a ranking system, but that does not show you how much damage can happen if exploited.

Using a cheat sheet is does have it’s benefits. There are parts of languages that are not used a lot, for example opacity in CSS. This can be a very useful attribute if you need to use it. For attributes that you don’t use a whole lot cheat sheets can be very beneficial. They can help you save time when you are looking for a solution to an issue you may have. Other times, it helps to have cheat sheets that will tell you what browsers support what elements of languages. Not all browsers are alike, and knowing that Firefox does not support transitions like Internet Explorer does will save you a lot of headaches trying to get it to work. Another benefit to cheat sheets is that you don’t have to remember how to remember a lot of stuff, which is why cheat sheets are around in the first place. Remember all of the HTML code for characters such as a greater than symbol is useful if you them a lot, but if you don’t it is simpler to just use a cheat sheet.

Over all cheat sheets have their benefits and their negative effects on any designer. For things that you use everyday you should not use cheat sheets, but for those uncommon attributes that are not used, then a cheat sheet can be beneficial, as long as it does not provide a security exploit.