Re:Things I don’t want to do to grow my side project
by lolinder on Sunday May 01, 2022 @02:27PM
(#31227424)
The skills required to design something that looks good and provides a good experience for users are orthogonal to the skills required to build well-factored, responsive HTML and CSS.
I've worked with marketing teams that tried to build their own HTML and CSS and ended up getting something that looked great... as long as you viewed it at the exact resolution of their designer's monitor. I had to go in and make it all work on mobile, which was a nightmare because their markup and styles were so badly organized. It took as much work as if they'd just given me PNGs.
More recently I received a bunch of designs from a designer who worked in Adobe XD. The designs were great, and what I got from XD was an interactive template and some very rough auto-generated CSS (mostly colors, fonts, and border radii). This was the sweet spot for me: no breaking out the color picker or guessing what letter-spacing they're using, but I could make the code work with my templating engine and make it responsive without having to rewrite bad code that they charged me for.
If you can find a designer that is great at both design and code, awesome! Keep them! But if not, chances are the most productive workflow is to let them do what they do best and just plan on doing the rest.
I've worked with marketing teams that tried to build their own HTML and CSS and ended up getting something that looked great... as long as you viewed it at the exact resolution of their designer's monitor. I had to go in and make it all work on mobile, which was a nightmare because their markup and styles were so badly organized. It took as much work as if they'd just given me PNGs.
More recently I received a bunch of designs from a designer who worked in Adobe XD. The designs were great, and what I got from XD was an interactive template and some very rough auto-generated CSS (mostly colors, fonts, and border radii). This was the sweet spot for me: no breaking out the color picker or guessing what letter-spacing they're using, but I could make the code work with my templating engine and make it responsive without having to rewrite bad code that they charged me for.
If you can find a designer that is great at both design and code, awesome! Keep them! But if not, chances are the most productive workflow is to let them do what they do best and just plan on doing the rest.