Dealing with Designers

Colin A. Bartlett — Mon, 21 May 2007 10:54:00 -0400

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

"Dealing with Designers" by Kevin

Mon, 21 May 2007 12:52:24 -0400

Up on RubyForge we (Viget Labs) have an application, Tyrant, that manages Rails instances for designers. The basic idea is that one server centrally hosts the designer/tester/PM mongrels and Tyrant controls starting and stopping them. This is great for us because it cuts down on sys admin duties that are shared amongst developers.

It's functionally finished but we want to do an internal code review and have a designer pretty it up a bit before we unleash it on the world. The first official release should (hopefully) be early June. It probably targets a small audience, though.

has_many :thoughts: Dealing with Designers

Dealing with Designers

"Dealing with Designers" by Kevin