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Designers read this and developers will love you

photoshopetiquette.com

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Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#21

Post by jaysonelliot »

I love this manifesto. BUT.

This reminds me of a problem I've pondered for a long time now, without coming up with an answer. Why are web pages designed with Photoshop in the first place?

Photoshop was never meant to be used for web design, any more than Visio was meant to make wireframes. It's simply the best tool available for the job, and requires a lot of workarounds and good behavior on the part of the designer.

Spending days or even weeks designing Photoshop comps that then have to be cut up, converted, and manually translated into suitable graphics for coders to work with is inefficient, and often leads to final products that don't match the designer's work. Text is the most obvious example, but I'm sure anyone can think of myriad places where this happens.

Is there a tool that lets designers think about the structure coders will have to build WHILE they're designing the screens? I'm not talking about a WYSIWYG code generator—those have been tried over and over again, and they all suck. I'm talking about a tool that lets designers design, lets coders code, but helps the designer think about what the coder will have to do with the graphics, including keeping text as text, identifying UI elements that need to be reused, seeing how layouts will look when the browser resizes, etc.

If this tool doesn't exist, it sure would be a great project for someone to build.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#24

Post by jurre »

justjimmy wrote: post #19

I know this isn't the gospel and there is no right/wrong way to hand the files to the developers, but I was wondering if anyone else slice up all the images and organize them before handing it off to their developers? Especially when drop shadows for images/png are involved, I tend to slice it all myself for pixel perfection and organize into appropriately file names for the developers.

I don't think a lot of people are still slicing up photoshop mockups? At least I hope not as the need for it should be fairly limited with CSS3.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#25

Post by kamjam »

eswat wrote: post #10
unn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"this is just your, developer's job" Shockingly, it's not. Most places I know of are moving away from a the designer and frontend developer positions. It's a big cost savings, not just in salary but in cycle time as well. Our designer sends us his designs in HTML. There is no bickering over fonts, no pixel perfection, no stupid photoshop-isms -filters, drop shadows, embossing, etc. I'm pretty sure he doesn't even hav…

Most places I know of are moving away from a the designer and frontend developer positions. Is just in regards to bare HTML/CSS or JavaScript interaction as well? I’d think most companies would be hard-pressed to find a designer that could write in the full HTML/CSS/JS stack needed for webapps these days and be equally competent in interaction or visual design – as ironic as that sounds – in which case FEDs are still…

You'd think that, but I've met some very good designers that can work that full stack. The world is changing and people need to upskill or get left behind.

HTML/CSS is not that difficult. Even jQuery is pretty simple. Good jQuery is hard. Good Javascript harder still.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#27

Post by _johnny »

bmj wrote: post #20
_johnny wrote: post #3

I'm a frontend developer and I think some of these expectations make little sense. Giving a name to every layer is a lot of work and I don't care about it that much. I'll do my work with layers like "Layer 0 copy copy" as long as they're grouped. Having designer rename all the layers is a lot of work that would be better spent creatively. (Does your boss want to pay the designer for it?) Another example: "#34 Be fami…

Another example: "#34 Be familiar with browser compatibility" - this is just your, developer's job. I cannot imagine expecting a designer to know about IE6 limitations (and tons of hacks and techniques to overcome them). This might be overstated. How about "know your medium?" If you, as a print designer, were tasked to design a bag for dog food, would you Photoshop your ideas, then tell the production guy it's his jo…

OK, you (and other commenters) are right. It was an overstatement. I agree with your last paragraph.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#28

Post by chrislomax »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #21

I love this manifesto. BUT. This reminds me of a problem I've pondered for a long time now, without coming up with an answer. Why are web pages designed with Photoshop in the first place? Photoshop was never meant to be used for web design, any more than Visio was meant to make wireframes. It's simply the best tool available for the job, and requires a lot of workarounds and good behavior on the part of the designer.…

Now I am going to get killed for saying this but it's almost like you are referring to Microsoft Expression Web or something to that effect.

When we were doing work in Silverlight (god rest its soul), there was the facility to have designers working on the design and developers working on the code.

Now, what you are referring to may be the actual Expression Web product they offer. I don't know, but it sounds very familiar to the Silverlight version.

No, I am not suggesting everyone moves to PC to use this software, I am just bringing to light the possibility the software may already exist!

We personally have no issue mocking up our sites in Photoshop then them being sent over to the developers to be sliced and used. We have never really felt this process to be in-efficient either. I think so long as the designer has a clear understanding about what the developers need then it's fine. When you have print designers getting used to web development for the first time, that's when you have problems.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#29

Post by kamjam »

_johnny wrote: post #3

I'm a frontend developer and I think some of these expectations make little sense. Giving a name to every layer is a lot of work and I don't care about it that much. I'll do my work with layers like "Layer 0 copy copy" as long as they're grouped. Having designer rename all the layers is a lot of work that would be better spent creatively. (Does your boss want to pay the designer for it?) Another example: "#34 Be fami…

I'll do my work with layers like "Layer 0 copy copy" as long as they're grouped.

That's shocking. That's like me as a developer naming my variables var1, var2, var3 etc. I'll get shot if I did that and would rightly do the same to anyone else that did that.

I do some Photoshop work, mainly for personal purposes and naming those layers makes it easier for me when I need to revisit those files. Stop thinking here and now and start thinking about your follow colleague that needs to take your pile of junk on.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#30

Post by justjimmy »

jurre wrote: post #24
justjimmy wrote: post #19

I know this isn't the gospel and there is no right/wrong way to hand the files to the developers, but I was wondering if anyone else slice up all the images and organize them before handing it off to their developers? Especially when drop shadows for images/png are involved, I tend to slice it all myself for pixel perfection and organize into appropriately file names for the developers.

I don't think a lot of people are still slicing up photoshop mockups? At least I hope not as the need for it should be fairly limited with CSS3.

Sorry, I'm not very proficient with CSS3 yet – you can create drop shadows along the free form outline of png images?
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