News / Bridging the gap between designers and developers

Entering the corporate world

When starting my first web based role for a small Brighton based media company, I had the usual concerns of someone who had no prior corporate experience:

Do I know enough?
Will I fit in?
Can I deliver under pressure and within given timeframes?

Luckily for me, my love for building websites meant I had a well rounded knowledge of both design and client side scripting languages (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript). This turned out to be a very important asset.

The problem

In any given web agency you have a design and a development team. What these teams are called and the compartmentalisation of them may differ, but the principle holds true that there is are two separate skill sets. To ensure a smooth workflow, recommendations or even rules are made for designers, which usually sound something like:

Only use "safe fonts"
Keep to a well used layout
Use 'typical' or default designs for displaying record sets or data, for example html lists

These are some good general principles, and the internet is riddled with in accessible, un useable websites due to a lack of understanding of these points, but because of my background in coding, I felt I had a unique opportunity to not push, but rather flex the boundaries of web design.

Why this is important

I feel as graphic designers of the web, we owe it to our trade and ourselves to not rest on our laurels but accept and dare I say it, embrace this circumstance as a challenge.

If we don’t pursue, push or test, we won’t find, break-through or discover, and without discovery and variety, life and work become stale and ambitions unreachable.

Ongoing considerations during the design phase

Is the navigation clear and well segmented?
Can the layout be broken in to clear reusable sections?
If "un safe" fonts are used, consider the usage and if the client will want to update the text frequently. Consider sifR text replacement.
Ensure the following has either a design or a note stating browser default styling
- P, h1, h2, h3, h4, ul, ul li, ol, ol li, fieldset, label, input, textarea, select, ul li ul, ol li ol, a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active
When designing visual elements, consider which html attributes will make up the elements, and try to design so it uses only minimal CSS and XHTML.
Consider the data which will be inserted and plan for every eventuality, i.e. will the data wrap across multiple lines? Will a long URL be set to display only up to x amount of characters?

The outcome and benefits

Setting challenges to provide a truly unique, beautiful and robust design will set you aside against countless other web designers. Showing respect and understanding for a developers job, will make you an obvious choice for any project, and will pay off when months down the line your site still looks fantastic!