Why do I think that something is wrong with the design stage? Just until recently, serious problems at this stage arose in our studio. It was important for me to understand, this is our local problem or a common problem, so I talked a lot and substantively with my colleagues on this topic. It turned out that in one way or another design problems arise for everyone.
But “problems at the design stage” is too general a formulation, which hides a whole bunch of problems, seemingly unrelated:
Designers are slow. From the point of view of the project manager, designers work much slower than developers, layout designers, and copywriters. And if the deadline is close, the designers start working at the speed of a turtle. Smash their thunder!
Designers on staff produce their own “handwriting”, their vision of the beautiful . Maybe in the ideal world this is good, but in reality the designer draws over and over again what he sees fit, and not what the art director wants to see. As a result, the cast is removed, the client leaves.
If a studio takes a risk and relies on remote designers , a risk is added to the above problems, which is well illustrated by the old saying “Every gopher in the field is an agronomist”. Indeed, among the thousands of great freelancers who proudly call themselves graphic designers, one can hardly find a couple of hundred professionals who know what the words “typography”, layout, ”,“ composition ”actually mean, what Edward Tufti wrote about and what makes UX different from ui. And if at the same time, within the studio, the competence of the art director is entrusted to the project manager, who, even without training the designers, is full of worries, the output can be embarrassing. The manager will rely on the designer, the designer will rely on chance, and the client will receive what place in the section “satire and humor”, and not on the main page of the site like Responsive Web Design Company in Lahore.
Well, well, we slipped between Scylla of the design ego and Charybdis of the favored deadlines, got our hands on a ready-made PSD layout, exhaled ... and realized that the problems had just begun.
Sponsor of the following section of the article: Research Institute of problems listed in the Hermes Conrad column.
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Problems while working with PSD layouts
Behavior of controls. The reaction of site controls to various events (mouse hovering on menu items, buttons, links, checkboxes, images, etc.) is part of modern web design. It is good if the designer conscientiously reacted to his work and described these states in a layout. But, as a rule, the designer misses this moment, the layout designer receives a layout with static elements, the dynamics are left to his discretion.
The client does not know what the site will look like with the approved layout. It is not enough to agree on the layout, the client should like the design that he sees on the site. Website page like RedLeos after conversion from PSD layout to layout often looks different. The customer needs to mentally place the presented picture (layout) in the browser window and scale it to the desired size, taking into account the proportions and sizes of all possible screens. And ... expectations often diverge from reality. Even if the client liked the design in the picture, it can be upset by what he sees on the site.
Reflect the adaptability of the layout. Increasingly, customers are looking for information from phones and tablets, making purchases there. The habit of evaluating the design of desktop devices has been replaced by the need to create mockups for mobile. If the coder caught his luck and got a layout that takes into account versions for mobile devices, a maximum of five widths await him. The rest is a product of the layout designer.
Measurements and definitions. At the stage of layout, the imposer spends considerable time on defining fonts, colors, sizes and indents. If the designer determined the integrity of the composition “by eye”, the maker-uper has to do the same thing: measure the desired color with a pipette, every millimeter with a ruler. Manual alignment of fonts, links and illustrations is a waste of time and mental health of all participants in the process.
Layers ... The subject of mutual hatred and the thousand-year war between designers and layout designers is, of course, the layers in the layout. A layout in which the order of the layers is respected is a rare miracle. But even in this case, the coder will have to spend time deciphering the names of each layer.
Layout materials are not optimized for web standards. More rarely, in the layout, you can find an archive in which all graphic elements are collected, correctly named and optimized for the web. If there is no such archive, the layout designer creates (spending a certain amount of time).
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