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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

#51

Post by _johnny »

zavulon wrote: post #44
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…

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 design…

Totally agree with you, it was the same in places I've worked.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#52

Post by pixelcort »

feverishaaron wrote: post #43

All that work to create a responsive layout, then they put an omnipresent, fixed position social bar that covers the text when viewed on a phone.

These also often break Page Down on desktop browsers as well. After paging, I always have to scroll up a little bit to see the line of text where I left off.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#53

Post by _johnny »

gnaritas wrote: post #42
_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 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.

Sorry to be shocking :)

I defend them because they're paid to do beautiful work and lack of layer names was never really an issue for me. Maybe just a couple of times. If the mess they left would be too big for me, then I'd complain. As long as I can deal with it, it's their decision whether they name layers or not. I definitely don't need every layer to have a name.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#54

Post by _johnny »

gnaritas wrote: post #45
_johnny wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possib…

> If you can't build me a complete cross browser HTML template, a skin, for a website, you aren't a web designer.

If you've found such people - great. In places I've worked it was different. And designers did exceptionally beautiful things which I really appreciate. I'm proud that I've worked with them, even if they left some mess to be cleaned.

There is some knowledge and experience needed in dealing with IE6, having CSS well organized, images optimized, adding even light JavaScript.

If I was hiring (I do not), I'd totally prefer to have two people who can together build something great, than look for one person and receive worse results.

And I'd prefer my people to do what they do best. The skillset required in designing rich graphics is different than coding.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#55

Post by untog »

icebraining wrote: post #23

In the USE LICENSED ICONS/PHOTOS, try this first: http://flickr.com/search/?l=4&q=hamster support the Creative Commons!

"content requiring attribution"

That can be a real pain, design-wise and image-wise (I don't want to look cheap). Creative Commons is great, but requiring attribution means that it won't be used in a lot of projects.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#56

Post by robszumski »

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…

The Illustrator-style layer selection is enough of a reason to use Fireworks over Photoshop. You spend more time trying to navigate the layers in a PSD than actually designing. Drives me crazy.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#57

Post by toddmorey »

nmcfarl wrote: post #36

I like the content - but not the tone - it’s just a bit too snarky to send to a designer that you have to work with. Particularly if she’s getting much of it right - and you’ve clashed over this stuff before.

Totally agree! I was hoping to have something to send to a few of the designers I work with, but the tone is totally insulting. (ie "Nice try!")

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#58

Post by icebraining »

untog wrote: post #55
icebraining wrote: post #23

In the USE LICENSED ICONS/PHOTOS, try this first: http://flickr.com/search/?l=4&q=hamster support the Creative Commons!

"content requiring attribution" That can be a real pain, design-wise and image-wise (I don't want to look cheap). Creative Commons is great, but requiring attribution means that it won't be used in a lot of projects.

Attribution doesn't necessarily mean it has to be in the users' face, just ask her/him if a line in the footer or in a credits page or even just in the source is OK.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#59

Post by mgcross »

Wonderful list, the only thing I'd add is to convert a PSD to sRGB before handing off if using a different color space.

Regarding export: the Monitor Color vs. Document Profile popup: http://photoshopetiquette.com/#exporting unless I'm mistaken, this only pertains to the preview of the optimized image within Photoshop.

And if you must embed a color profile on export, save it for photos only.

Re: Designers read this and developers will love you

#60

Post by talmand »

zavulon wrote: post #44
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…

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 design…

Right off I wanted to disagree about the preprocessor use for CSS. I just can't see that something like those has taken off so much that it's on the same level as something like jQuery.

But then it made me curious, I can't say that since I have no numbers and it's just an assumption. Are there any indicators of how popular tools like less or sass have become as opposed to regular CSS?

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