I found this on twitter, courtesy of Andrew Duck, who found this gem on reddit.com.
If you’re a web designer working alongside print designers with little to no web design/dev knowledge, how is your experience?
Teeth-grindingly annoying.
Print-turned-web designers:
- Learn the medium you’re working in. A five minute video of even the best print advert makes for a lousy TV advert. Likewise, techniques and habits refined by years of print design are often sub-optimal or flatly counter-productive when applied to the web.
- For the love of god, give up on pixel-perfect positioning and learn to appreciate flow layout. Sure, it makes design harder… but if you think designing flow layouts is hard, think about us poor schmucks who have to implement the damn things. And if you think flow layouts are ugly, let’s see how good your precious pixel-perfect design works when I do something freakishly unusual like resize my browser window.
- Print pages are Things To Look At. Web sites are Things To Use. Prioritising aesthetics over usability or functionality is like putting a car steering wheel in the middle of the dashboard “because it looks nicer there”. You think it’s pretty and a real design coup, but everyone else is laughing at your idiocy (… or swearing at it if the design ever gets into production). Incidentally, I swear if I get one more design through with a “button” image but no pressed button image (or “link” style but no “active/hover/visited” link style) I will personally bite off your head and defecate into your body-cavity. You have been warned.
- Conventions are not boring – conventions are your friend. Putting light-switches near doors is a convention. Sure, putting them square in the middle of the ceiling is innovative, but then so is cheesegrating your knees (hey – do you know anyone who’s done it?). Innovative means “nobody else is doing it”. Accept the possibility that nobody else is doing it because it’s a fucking stupid idea.
- I don’t want to “explore the interface”. I want to get in, do my shit and get out again. If you think forcing users to explore the interface is such a good idea, try ripping the labels off all the cans of food in your cupboard. A couple of meals of cat-food, chilli and peaches should demonstrate exactly how “fun” this is.
Been there. Done it. Bashed head against desk many times. I am not alone.
I’ve also done several blogs about this. I am a designer who codes. I design but the past few years since I love CSS, I code the page from someone else’s design more often.
Print designers who design for the web do the stupidest tings for sure. Like designing a page that can’t be put together well, and my biggest complaint, using some weird font at 80% tracking and 9.2 pt in some pod that can’t be resized easily.
I doubt many designers will read your blog as coders, so this is indeed frustrating.
For me, it’s been taking that print designer and showing them how I slice up their page and use some images for background images and others inside a div. I show them how the page looks in Dreamweaver, BBEdit, or whatever. They MUST see the code! or they’ll never get it.
So the problem isn’t that a designer is incapable of doing what we are asking. Just ignorant. The big problem is we are often cut out of the design loop with the client until it’s time for us to make the page function. If we then say anything, it’s the “This was approved by the client, why am I just now finding out about this”. (Direct quote from a few years back)
As I see it, somehow we need to get in from the beginning and explain why certain things need to be done certain ways. Make a standards document, which includes things like usability. Where search buttons should go, and other things the end user expects.
Then make a checklist for the designer so they know what is expected of them as far as we are concerned. I want layers named and organized from Photoshop, but would prefer they use Fireworks for example. Done in pages.
I design everything in Fireworks myself. It makes going from a wireframe for general positioning so the client can see the page from the beginning. It also involves the clients being educated a bit too.
Bottom line, instead of us complaining, lets band together and do something about it. Make our standards documents available on our sites so others can take them, alter to their companies needs and pass it forward. Lets get the Sales reps and the designers and us in the same rooms and discuss how a site should be done. Explaining how smoother the workflow will be i we are all in constant communication, instead of bringing us in from the dark basement in the end.
We are the ONLY ones with this knowledge. It is up to US to do something about it. Change the way the company works through a site. Speak up and change things and stop complaining. Only we can change how print designers make websites. We are the problem, since no one is telling the print designer any different. Only we can turn this around in our favor! DO IT!
Hi Dee
Excellent comment, and fantastic reply! You certainly win a prize for that one.
I agree with you. If the majority developers weren’t treated as mushrooms (kept in the dark, fed on crap), then it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.
I think designers are starting to understand the requirements of developers in the building process, and some I have worked with are fantastic at recognising possible issues or areas that may cause trouble before I get a chance to mention them.
Admittedly, the process would be better and easier to manage if developers were involved in the initial process of design and liasons with the client.
The plans for the standards documents sounds like an interesting one, and I certainly feel like it’s possible. Perhaps you could share some ideas for the template / core structure of the document?
Would love to read your previous blog posts about this subject. Post a link back to them if you get a chance.