Why you should move that button 3px to the left

It's also that for a designer that 3px is HUGE.

It's like if you see this in your code:

  print 1
  print 2
  print 3
  print 4
  print 5
  print 6
  print 7

Any programmer would refactor that in a heartbeat without thinking too much about the impact or if it really matters.. it's just a plain bad smelly code.

For a designer, unaligned things is just as annoying. It's not that much about if other people can see it. Some will "feel" it, some will clearly see it, some won't see it. But it's just smelly wrong.

Yes you could make a point of not tweaking it, but it's faster anyway to fix it rather than discuss it.

So why should you move that button? The article doesn't actually answer the question. If a UX designer just says "move the button by 3px because it looks nicer", then there is a good chance that someone higher up the hierarchy will say move the button by 4px because that looks better. And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "more delightful", the person with more seniority wins.

Contrast this with the engineering version of this debate where the decision between using foosort and barsort can be decided based on which one results in lower CPU usage. Or a UI element is moved 3px because it allows reducing the depth of the UI widget tree which improves the FPS by X during complex animations. Or that a button's bg shouldn't be #282828 because of the problems with 16-bit color.

The other big problem with quibbling over 3px in Photoshop mocks is that the mocks tend to be designed on high dpi displays using Photoshop or Illustrator which do not need to handle realtime rendering so they use high quality antialiasing and scaling. When the mocks are implemented, the final product is viewed on a multitude of devices with different rendering characteristics. So the 3px change might result in a blurry line because the widget no longer snaps to the pixel grid of the lower resolution device after the system scales the image to handle resolution independence.

So if a designer asks for a 3px change without justification, then the engineer should push back until a good reason is given. There are objective aspects to UI and subjective aspects. Discussing the former is straightforward and the decisions are relatively easy to make. But discussing the latter quickly degenerates into bikeshedding.

'I'm having a tougher and tougher time appreciating these photoshop cowboys. '

Give me a break. That's the default these days. I've yet to met iOS developers or front-end engineers who can't design.

We don't need these photoshop goons anymore.

>Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.

What does this mean?