Lazy designers
Imagine you are a car manufacturer and you want your cars not only to outperform your competitor’s cars in technical performance but also in visual appeal. Of course you would hire a designer to do that. Any designer? No - you would hire a designer that not only is a good designer but one that also knows about aerodynamics and the technical limitations like how much space does the motor take up.
Same game, different results with web designers. Every designer i worked with to create a website had no idea what designing for the web is about (one noticeable exception, who happens to be an ex-flatmate and a very good friend). All of them simply replied with “simply cut it out” or “pick the color from the photoshop file” when confronted with questions about how to get all the info needed to implement the design in html.
»Can’t you just pick the colors from the screenshot?«
And just right there is the flaw. A developer doesn’t “program” html to a presented design - at least not in the first iteration. The designer does. They all acted like doing something like actually learning about html or css is not their business and thusly don’t even bother with it. It’s programmer’s work in their eyes.
Virtually every single design i was confronted with implementing in html had major flaws since they were simply not suited for browsers or left major questions unanswered.
A current example is a supposed Web-design for a company i work for where the design, present only in one jpg and a png and of course a fucking EPS since the design was done in quark express - a tool for designing pages for PRINT, specifies a vertical gradient in the body. The images which were glued into a safari frame in the image to give the impression of being done already left the question of what happens further down completely unanswered. Additionally the design specified a drop shadow on a vertical gradient dropped by the middle content area, a 100% height area. What’s wrong with those people? That’s about the toughest things you can try to get running in all browsers. Well, still manageable. The next problem though is the font size. A simple question like “Which font?” only produces answers like “Officina Bold Cut #234” which is totally bollocks since you CANNOT do that in html unless you want to use images everywhere, which you really don’t want to do since the whole thing is supposed to be powered by a CMS.
A typical reaction i observe in designers when seeing “their” design being implemented in the browser is complete disbelief what the stupid coder did to his work of art. It’s not exactly pixel precise and contains more menus than originally (using a cms… *sigh*). And of course they all complain about the font not being the one they put in the screenshots. What am i? Psychic? How am i to know what font that is in the screenshot? I asked the designer 3 times what font it is just for that question to be evaded. When finally confronted with that question while i demo the website in its final form is evaded AGAIN “Oh, i don’t know. I need to look that up“. Where? Look it up where? I want that document! We paid for that information and got - nothing. Sadly nearly every time a designer was involved he was paid by a third party who brought him in on political elements in the first place. Baaad. Very bad. If a customer comes up to you as a developer to “program a website” for them and they insist on that or that designer doing the design work - RUN!
When i hire a designer directly i want a design specification document being part of the whole thing - by contract! No exact specifications - no money. I’m so fed up with fiddling around with color pickers trying to pick the right color from a text - which is heavily antialiased by photoshop. Of course you will not get the open photoshop file in the first place since the act like it’s a trade secret.
Well, even if i had the photoshop file, what is it good for me?
What’s so difficult with producing 2 or 3 sample mockup websites that present the design? That way the designer can exactly specify the fonts, colors and can observe and test first hand how his design works and behaves in a browser. In a perfect world you would get a few naked html template like files with some dummy text as content, accompanied by the necessary images, readily prepared for the web for best impact as the designer intended and a document specifying exactly the idea(s) of the design and detailing technical things like font sizes, colors and so on.
February 7th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
true, true. you are right, but for this reason and that i can’t work with a html file provided by a non html gui (what designer are most of the time) i like to build it myself with all the css tricks i know that make the code beautiful. but as you said. the fonts and colors should be provided by the designer not read from a PS file or guessed from an jpeg…
February 8th, 2007 at 12:16 am
I agree with them not knowing all the html + css nicenesses out there but that is fine. The point in requiring a html mockup is that they get at least their hands a little dirty. They see if something they try to come up with in a browser is even possible.
Back to my comparison with the car designer. What would i want from such a guy except nice drawings is probably a clay model of a design. He doesn’t need to know all about how to mold the metal. He just gets his hands a little dirty (this time for real
) and guess what - it even is positive for the design process as the designer can get an impression first hand about how it will look in real 3d.