21–30 of 164 posts
Every time you request changes instead of making them yourself, you are taking away from the time they can spend delivering improvements in their area of expertise, executable code.
>As designers, we are held responsible for the overall quality of the experience. Yet we’re at the mercy of our teams Part of me empathizes and sees the similarity. Another part of me wants to point out that there is nothing stopping the designer from fixing this themselves. Learn your medium.
Some companies have rules that actually do prevent people from just diving on and doing whatever they want with the code.
There ate plenty of broken corporate cultures out there.
* For the record, while this person obviously seems talented, I really dislike how the site jarringly starts shifting the content you're reading over to the side a second after load. If he wants to write about tiny little design details, I'd argue that's one of the most annoying things that he's missed.
When I used to work with my designer friend, he would tell me to do things like that: increase this padding by 5px, lighten the color by a little, slightly decrease the border-radius, etc. One by one like that, I find it hard to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself. Anyway, slightly OT: the screenshot looks like a…
Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc? Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.
Wow, this is a superb article that resonates with me as much as anything I've ever read on the subject. It practices what it preaches, too. Reading it made me feel the very things it's talking about. I sense, though, that the author's tactics for working with teams that don't share his values are half-measures. It reminds me of the large and sad literature on "organizational change" in software development, wherein p…
Unless my personal experience has been wildly unrepresentative, software developers tend as a group to be almost obsessive about getting fine details right. We’re the guys who worry about whether our design will be as easy as possible to maintain in the face of arbitrary future requirements or whether using some clever data structure would have given 0.07% better performance. We know, rationally, that sometimes our work is good enough and that we need to move on to other useful things, yet still there is a little voice in the back of our heads telling us we should have done better.
If I were to pick one other group who tend to exhibit the same trait, it would be designers. There ought to be a natural camaraderie here that makes it easy for little details to get done right. If that’s not the default outcome, and probably something that people in management and sales regularly have to balance with pressure to ship, the first question should be why.
When I used to work with my designer friend, he would tell me to do things like that: increase this padding by 5px, lighten the color by a little, slightly decrease the border-radius, etc. One by one like that, I find it hard to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself. Anyway, slightly OT: the screenshot looks like a…
Then again, this article is from Google Ventures, so maybe they are just using internal design resources.
And Yes. Yes. The difference that the 3px makes is incredible. So do get yourself that extra 26" IPS monitor with extra 1920 x 1200 pixels.
I will kindly warn you though, that I do have some reservations about mentioned 'Apple glossy pixels', as although I'm currently wasting time writing this on a pixel-perfect glossy MacBook Air, nothing frustrates me more as are the reflections on that perfect glossy mirror. Which I can see right now. Or the inconsistent /, , , keys, when I'm actually working [if you need to spend significant amounts of time jumping between Mac/Linux and working in a command line, you will understand]. Or inability to connect two monitors to a MacBook Pro. Or how slow is the GCC on the virtual machine on that MacBook Pro with puny 16Gb of RAM. So do take the advice of the designer, but also keep in mind that all that glitters is not necessarily gold.
One big perception is that if the UI is not quite right (or worse), the code is also not quite right (or worse). Since the UI is seen and code is unseen, it becomes the visible representation of overall quality. So even if the code is tight and elegant underneath a sloppy UI, it will be perceived at the quality of the UI.
Absolutely. To nearly everyone, the user interface is the program. This sounds like a truism but really is the opposite. It has important practical consequences.
I would add to that the reason I’m wary of shipping an unpolished product as early as possible with the idea of refining it later: you only get one chance to make a first impression.
To people below who say the designer should make the change him or helself -- as a front-end developer, I say a million times, NO NO NO. Does the designer know how to use git and commit properly? Do they know on what branch? Understand the deployment schedule? Perform browser testing? Are they part of code reviews? Do they understand whether that rule is used by just that component, or just that page, or if it will affect code elsewhere?
I think it's great when designers know enough to code the CSS of their own portfolio or blog, and can converse fluently about the concepts. But unless they're true hybrid designer-coders who are participating fully in dev meetings, please DO NOT touch the code. I've seen sites break too many times before, because a designer changed something they didn't understand, and which there was no reason for them to understand anyways. (And to anybody who would say a designer should understand their tools, well it's not like most print designers can operate a printing press either. Design professionals design, and generally other professionals actually implement those designs.)
And to anyone who replies "design has caused real harm to the WWW", sorry buddy, that boat has sailed, and makes as much sense as saying we should expect Rolling Stone magazine to come in a dot-matrix text printout instead of a glossy, attractive magazine. Design is important, period.