OMG, that new #devrant section will help me release some steam. I am full stack dev, but I work mainly on the front recently. I have to deal with files (illustrator) from designers who have no idea what they are doing. Let me take you on my journey to "scratching my head while watching at my screen".
Let's start with the basics, color:
Well, I never received a design with the color palette included. I do care, because each page is designed in a separate file, and I eyedrop the colors to make the CSS. I often discover that 2 blue buttons on 2 pages have, in fact, 2 different blues. It's not humanly noticeable, but it shows they don't use a color palette for their own work. It's like if I wrote my programs without the help of constants...
Next, spacing:
Every page has a different spacing between the different blocks (or sections) that compose the content. Even the space before the footer is random! Of course I don't comply, and make what seems to me a good average. They don't care because I fix all the spacings for all the pages and nobody told me to "comply" to the design...ever...
This applies for content width as well. I worked last week on a site where 2 pages had 3 or 4 different content widths. And one page even had 2 different widths for multiple sections...
We can continue with fonts:
I receive designs where there is no "default" font. Yes, I check all pages, and I can't find an area of the design that makes me think: "that is the default font". Like on different pages, even if the font has the same size, the letter-spacing and line-height are different! Same page I was working on last week, different paragraphs had different spacings, it looked so weird!
Lastly, they don't know about mobiles.
Seriously, half of the designs I receive have pictures with "rollover" effects to show a legend, or sometimes popup menus. I am always thinking: "how do we show the users on tablet such content?". And of course, I have to figure it out, because instructions are still to be found.
The worst about mobile designs, is that they make the font bigger at 750px.
Yes, ok, but why only ONE section of the page?
And, mobiles have down to 320px width of screen estate, do I keep that font at 42px?
I make the font proportional to the view width in those cases (thanks vw unit!), but I never had corresponding instructions ever....
Good job if you read down to here, you deserve a cookie 🍪.
Stop finger-pointing, and start deep diving. Without designers, fundamentals like CSS wouldn't exist.
Design is not limited to aesthetics.
Just by making statements like the self-appointed "Full Stack" title (which is actually an individual stack, and not the entire gamut of every programming language in existence - which is what a Full Stack is - which was limited to two developers in the entire world, circa 1992, and no longer exists), maybe Developers don't know kuak about programming would be more appropriate.
To take it further, "Architects" are responsible for the backbone, yet most seem to be the laziest people I've ever met - using out of the box solutions, instead of learning how to build something without a generator built by someone else. This makes their projects "pre-fabs" as opposed to "homes", imo.
When it comes down to it, collaboration is key - so, the next time you decide to blame a designer, take a better look at how they are communicated to, killing any roadblocks (like expecting someone else to relay a message for you, via Project Manager). User flow is just as - if not, often more - important than the actual functionality, since it can limit unnecessary transactions and page loads that would normally be included by developers who don't understand the users they are creating the product for.
If you initialize any project by unwrapping a fancy box... you're doing it wrong.
For sure. I understand that we are going for all these modern designs but as design progresses, the care to also consider implementation at times isn't present. However, I have also found that these wild designs have pushed me to learn and build better UIs in general. There is a synergy that needs to be built between frontend developers and designers
I had faced similar issues in the past. However, I wouldn't put the blame entirely on the designers. Most of the time, there's little to almost zero collaboration between designers and developers which results in conflicts. Designers do what they have been asked to do by the clients or their bosses.
I guess both designers and development teams should collaborate often to solve such issues.
Alejandro
22 years, I love programming, design and everything related to Computer Science.
I completely understand you! I have faced all those issues, and it's worst when the designers implement something without asking you first if that's possible to do on web or mobile.
For me, a true web designer is the one that crafts the HTML/CSS, not the one that just puts together some elements on Illustrator/Xd because compared to the actual code that moves the web, that's a child's play and even then... they don't do it right. AND don't get me wrong, I have worked as a graphic designer too using the Creative Cloud suite, so I have been on the other side.
Also for me, hiring someone to make the mock-up and another one to replicate the same but on code is a lost of money, instead of having a front-end developer doing just the web, or both! since software like Adobe Xd is extremely easy to use and building a mock-up with it can be fast.