has_many :thoughts

Well known blogger Amy Hoy presented about interaction between designers and developers. She claims to be both a designer and a developer and chatted about the processes that she and others use to successfully integrate the work of coders and artists. My take-away points:

1. Teaching your designer about Rails, even just a little bit, can go a long way to a successful working relationship. Get them comfortable with what they will expect to see in View templates when reviewing erb (or haml, etc.) templates created by the Rails developers.
2. Have the designer use subversion (or CVS, in our case…. for now). If the designer is using OS X (as most are), it won’t take more than a half hour lesson to educate them as to the virtues of source code control and the how-to of checking out, checking in, updating, etc.
3. Design cannot be an afterthought. Get the designer involved early in the process so that their perspective can be incorporated into the decision making process as much as possible.
4. Use wireframes to mock up the pages of your site. The wireframes can start as simple as napkin sketches, but should ultimately be fleshed out in some kind of box/text format. This is far quicker then any kind of direct-to-Photoshop process.
5. There are several “hand off” points that can be utilized to switch the process from designer to developer. This was sort of a no-brainer. Obviously, some designers can handle HTML, others can’t, and the process of cutting Photoshop files down to HTML and CSS can either be handled by the developers or designers. I would love to find a really good designer that embraces XHTML/CSS as much as I’d like them to. But until that point, I think we’ll stick to doing the HTMLification ourselves.