Re:Developers, learn to design
by supercoder on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @07:32AM
(#5330800)
This designer-implementor conflict I think is the biggest hurdle with being both the designer and developer.
If you're thinking about the implementation too much while designing then it can compromise the design because you can tend to subconsciously shy away from things that may instinctively 'feel' hard.
So for me this is where the biggest strength of a separate designer can be if they're just focusing on making the design truthful to itself which in turn can challenge the programmer to push that bit more.
When I'm designing I consciously ignore any sense of "this is difficult/impossible to implement" and when I'm working with a designer I tell them to ignore development constraints in the design process. Once we have a fina design and it is impossible, sure you can reevaluate, but don't let that influence the initial designs IMO.
I could agree with that, but I found design extremely unpleasant. For instance: it's almost impossible to vertically center a <div> inside its parent <div> in CSS without some obscure magical CSS-guru hacks which usually include creating wrapper <div>s. Why should I change my markup to adapt to browser's representation? Why can't I just v-align: center it?
Are those rules? Sure. But extremely frustrating rules... and that's only the technical part of design!
Don't get me wrong, designing is an awesome tool for your belt, but I found it extremely frustrating. Maybe I'm the one to blame for it?