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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

#41

Post by rralian »

kamjam wrote: post #25
eswat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also think developers are getting much savvier about design, and the tools helping developers with design are getting better and better. So the person who winds up doing all the design/html/css/js may not be the person who started out as the designer. So designers, by all means, harvest that fear and push yourself to learn some new skills.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#42

Post by gnaritas »

_johnny wrote: post #39
kamjam wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

It's different than code. First of all, if the designer gets the job done without renaming layers, then it's his business. (In my experience, a lot of them don't need to name layers). Unless he hands over the design to someone else. I'm not sure how often it happens. Code is very often handed to different people. I doubt graphics need the same level of maintainability. But anyway, that's a thing between designers, an…

You don't rename anything, you name them correctly when you first create them. He's right, your behavior is shocking, and worse, you're trying to defend such bad practices.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#44

Post by zavulon »

unn wrote: post #5
_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…

"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…

I couldn't disagree more. Good HTML/CSS/JS code is not easy. It's hard work to make it look right for all browsers.. and these days you use actual programming languages (i.e. less/Sass) instead of CSS, anyway. It's hard work involving programming expertise to implement all JavaScript bells and whistles a modern website is expected to have. So it requires a good front end PROGRAMMER to do.

On other hand, a good designer is a creative person. They're not coders and shouldn't be expected to muck around with code. They're artists, who draw beautiful designs from blank page. The need for separation of roles couldn't be clearer to me, and I run a company that makes websites.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#45

Post by gnaritas »

_johnny wrote: post #7
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…

But then such designer is not a target for this "Manifesto". BTW, I see value in having one person create designs as HTML files, but I also know a lot of designers who create beautiful, graphics-rich designs and don't know much about code. I suppose it's much harder to find people who can do both as good as separate people.

Graphics rich designs that don't come with the markup, aren't beautiful. Any designer that can't code his own markup isn't a designer worth having, and certainly isn't a web designer. He's a print designer who doesn't know he's obsolete.

If you can't build me a complete cross browser HTML template, a skin, for a website, you aren't a web designer. That means you must know HTML, CSS, browser idiosyncrocies, and possibly some very light JavaScript. Developers should never even see a PSD file or worry about what it looks like in IE. That's a designers job.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#46

Post by feverishaaron »

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.…

Note to interested developers... there is a HUGE market for a disruptive tool in this space. If anyone is interested in working on such a tool, I'm game.

This is a constant frustration for web designers. Photoshop allows you to create fantastic visual effects, but the layout tools are abysmal. Fireworks is well... Fireworks – Adobe's "redheaded stepchild" in the tool chain. It's buggy with a slow, horrible UI. While some of Fireworks tools solve some of the layout problems (nine slice scaling, better vectors, grouping), their lack of decent masking and the horrible color picker and WTF interface actually slows designers down to where it become a draw.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#47

Post by psweber »

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.…

Some designers would love to use this tool you speak of.

The smoke weed and try a bunch of crazy things type of designer is pretty well served by Photoshop. You can hack things up easily, try visual ideas very quickly and then clean up your files when you find a direction that works.

Systemic designers would loooooove the tool you describe. Global control of grids, headline styles, body copy styles, form elements, buttons, links, graphic elements and scaling behavior. This is how they already think. Photoshop makes them update most of these things manually. Want to make a change to every page you are working on? Time for some tedious production work. Want to see how an idea would actually function? Too bad.

Note: Smoke weed designers are not to be underestimated. They come up with things that systemic designers never would. You might want a smoke weed designer working on your branding and a systemic designer on your web app.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#48

Post by kamjam »

_johnny wrote: post #39
kamjam wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

It's different than code. First of all, if the designer gets the job done without renaming layers, then it's his business. (In my experience, a lot of them don't need to name layers). Unless he hands over the design to someone else. I'm not sure how often it happens. Code is very often handed to different people. I doubt graphics need the same level of maintainability. But anyway, that's a thing between designers, an…

You say this now, but unless you have crystal ball you can't look into the future. I've worked in many places where something is designed, shelved, resurrected several months later, design tweeked, shelved, budget approved, resurrected...

Anyway, we're not talking about a thing between designers alone, we're talking about the fact that a lot of designs are passed on to developers to then code in html. You yourself highlight the fact that designers may not be familiar with browser incompatibility. We they can't factor these into the design then IMO it's pointless having them create the html.

That said, I agree with many points, like naming files properly (which costs almost nothing)

So naming files costs almost nothing nothing, but naming a layer correctly in the first place is a pain in the arse/takes up too much time... not much consistency to your logic here. As I recall, hitting F2 will take you into rename mode.

As gnaritas says, name it properly in the first place then there is no need to rename!

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#49

Post by jaysonelliot »

feverishaaron wrote: post #46
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.…

Note to interested developers... there is a HUGE market for a disruptive tool in this space. If anyone is interested in working on such a tool, I'm game. This is a constant frustration for web designers. Photoshop allows you to create fantastic visual effects, but the layout tools are abysmal. Fireworks is well... Fireworks – Adobe's "redheaded stepchild" in the tool chain. It's buggy with a slow, horrible UI. While…

I'd like to talk to you about this. Drop me a line on gmail, it's jayson.elliot

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#50

Post by _johnny »

kamjam wrote: post #48
_johnny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different than code. First of all, if the designer gets the job done without renaming layers, then it's his business. (In my experience, a lot of them don't need to name layers). Unless he hands over the design to someone else. I'm not sure how often it happens. Code is very often handed to different people. I doubt graphics need the same level of maintainability. But anyway, that's a thing between designers, an…

You say this now, but unless you have crystal ball you can't look into the future. I've worked in many places where something is designed, shelved, resurrected several months later, design tweeked, shelved, budget approved, resurrected... Anyway, we're not talking about a thing between designers alone, we're talking about the fact that a lot of designs are passed on to developers to then code in html. You yourself hi…

> not much consistency to your logic here

It is logical, because there are often hundreds of layers and presumably even more during the design process. Naming each one is a lot of work.

There are much less files in the end so it's totally different.

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