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Good designers put a lot of work into usability and requirements and all that fun UX stuff. And just because something is a bitch to program doesn’t mean it’s bad. The current project I’m on, the designers were putting months of work in before we started programming, figuring out what the customers need out of it and how to make those requirements work, and look good while at it
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Feb 1, 2020 18:59
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Dominoes posted:Designers are the idea guys of their fields. They're artists who want their art to come to life, bit don't care to learn how that's accomplished. It's a bad description. The very existence of Bootstrap (and the fact that most sites using it still look like poo poo) should be enough to validate designers' talents. I could maybe extend that description to a few bad UX designers I've met, but actual UX practitioners are valuable.
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Feb 1, 2020 19:46
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The real problem is that design is a huge field and someone with excellent skills in one subfield could be complete poo poo at another.
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Feb 1, 2020 19:59
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Most designers are bad just like most programmers are bad. The ones (in both fields) that aren't bad are just less bad. Design is as much empirical and objective as is programming and programming is as much a subjective art as is design. There's an impedance mismatch between pure programmers and pure designers...which is why programmers who can design and designers who can program are valuable.
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Feb 1, 2020 20:02
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The approach I most often see is a designer using a tool that allows them to more or less draw whatever they want, without any consideration for what’s easily expressible through html and css, if it’s consistent with front end components in our toolbox, and how someone would actually build it without it being insanely complicated. Granted these people generally draw something that looks better than what engineers would cook up, but the result is most things are special one-offs which are a complete puzzle to implement. Change that process to involve a designer who can produce a skeletal React component that at least looks right, and I imagine we’d be much more productive. I don’t think that designers are dumb and bad or anything, but the division of labor where design has a vision and engineers are responsible for everything else (making it function, hitting pixel perfection, begging for compromises, fixing bugs, maintaining the code for the entire rest of its life) doesn’t work that well. Currently design doesn’t have much incentive to deliver something that smoothly transitions to implementation.
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Feb 1, 2020 23:57
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I've had the bad luck of working with designers that were print media focused throughout much of their careers with only a vague grasp that the web is a whole different beast. They've also mysteriously been unable to recognize the need to maintain consistency when iterating on an established foundation. Like, I couldn't put together a particularly compelling design for the life of me, but I can at least recognize that consistent patterns throughout the application reduce cognitive load for the user (and, as an added bonus, are typically faster to develop). Small sample size, though, and each was open to well-meaning, constructive feedback. Just have to hope they find the time to explore what it means to design for the web a bit further.
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Feb 2, 2020 00:39
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Sigh, but a designer just costs so much! Just put a bullet point on the front end job listing about experience with photoshop and zeppelin.
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Feb 2, 2020 03:38
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It's all about figma and Invision now, Grandpa!!
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Feb 2, 2020 04:03
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We just hired an new art director, so far I've heard that they don't know about mobile first design, responsive design, and didn't want to change a color to be more readable on a white background because it looked fine on their screen.
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Feb 2, 2020 04:25
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Vincent Valentine posted:It's all about figma and Invision now, Grandpa!! figma balls
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Feb 2, 2020 04:31
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The Merkinman posted:We just hired an new art director, This is not an actual director-level role, right? 
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Feb 2, 2020 04:34
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I've been super lucky in only working with designers that have 1) realistic expectations (none of this pixel perfect bullshit) and 2) really great communication skills. This means they can communicate really well WHY they want something done and if it's not technically possible or realistic we can come to a compromise together on an alternative approach that still hits their stated goal. But I have no trouble at all believing that awful designers exist. What makes it difficult is the problem only presents itself when actually handing over to devs, since someone who is really bad at it could still theoretically create aesthetically pleasing designs.
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Feb 2, 2020 05:09
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PT6A posted:The real problem is that design is a huge field and someone with excellent skills in one subfield could be complete poo poo at another. This. Most people who hire for user interface positions actually evaluate and hire for graphic design skills. They are not the same.
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Feb 2, 2020 05:35
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The designer at my company is really good and the designers at my last job were really good as well. They would create the initial design and then we would iterate on it together based on what was possible/easily achieved/accessible/in budget etc. When I worked at an agency we would usually ahead of time come to an agreement like "ok this project has the budget for one really cool new thing but we have to reuse existing components as much as possible for everything else" and that usually left everyone pretty happy. I also really like implementing designs and I know for some developers they just see it as a chore or an obstacle so it's no wonder they hate their designers.
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Feb 2, 2020 06:41
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My own experience is filled with far more developers with entitlement complexes than it is with designers completely lost at sea or making unreasonable demands. Just a lot of combinations of the following behaviors: 1. Bemoaning a design team's feedback because the developer thinks consistent spacing and margins is too pedantic 2. Dramatically overstating the difficulty in implementing a less conventional design choice 3. Using a minor error in the designer's mock up ("tablets don't even HAVE hover states!") to dismiss the designer's expertise altogether Just as we're making GBS threads on print designers ill-suited for the web, I think we have a lot programmers ill-suited for front end development. rt4 posted:This is not an actual director-level role, right? Why wouldn't it be? 
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Feb 2, 2020 06:42
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A lot of the frustration on both sides comes down to ineffectual project management, I think. Every designer is going to come up with some designs that look good, but are a pain in the rear end and will take much longer to implement than a simpler design. Ultimately, whether to spend the extra engineering time to implement that as-designed, or whether design needs to come up with an alternative that can be built and shipped faster, is a project management decision. If PM is not making the decision, and is instead leaving designers and engineers to fight it out over how important/difficult various parts of the design are, then PM is not really doing its job.
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Feb 2, 2020 07:00
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All the designers that I've worked at over 2 jobs in the last 4-ish years since I became a developer have been totally and completely pleasant to work with 
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Feb 2, 2020 10:06
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YanniRotten posted:The approach I most often see is a designer using a tool that allows them to more or less draw whatever they want, without any consideration for what’s easily expressible through html and css, if it’s consistent with front end components in our toolbox, and how someone would actually build it without it being insanely complicated. This is why I like when designers at least understand what’s involved in implementing their designs. In my industrial design program, we dwelt a lot on manufacturing and how to design things for various manufacturing processes. When I shifted over to UI and UX, the mindset stuck and now instead of making sure it’s possible to produce the design via injection molding or such, I’m designing things that are producible with HTML/CSS/JS (and then also producing them). As we grow our team at my company, when I comes time to get more frontend people, I’ll be selecting for designer-programmers or programmers with an interest in design and a good eye for it. I agree that a more productive division of labor has the designers making the dumb display components and managing styles. That way, they’re thinking in CSS instead of Photoshop, have ownership over the display parts of the application and can take some weight off the developers, and remove the redundancy/extra work that comes from the developers having to interpret PS designs and/or translate HTML to JSX (like in that dumb setup with the “design” devs and the “code” devs). Cugel the Clever posted:I've had the bad luck of working with designers that were print media focused throughout much of their careers with only a vague grasp that the web is a whole different beast. They've also mysteriously been unable to recognize the need to maintain consistency when iterating on an established foundation. Like, I couldn't put together a particularly compelling design for the life of me, but I can at least recognize that consistent patterns throughout the application reduce cognitive load for the user (and, as an added bonus, are typically faster to develop). Being consistent and working with an established design foundation are pretty fundamental skills for a designer (including print designers), and I can imagine that trying to work with designers without those skills must have sucked. I once worked with a UX consultant who seemingly didn’t understand the concept of design affordances and it was quite frustrating. I had to explain to her that a complex form for a proprietary and novel setup process was not the place to try out newfangled crap like replacing conventional inputs and labels with slick-looking flat design editable content divs (that had to have instructive placeholder text to click here or else you wouldn’t realize it’s a form input). All the users already recognize and understand HTML inputs so why exacerbate the complexity by turning something obvious and easy into something unfamiliar and more difficult? She also missed (or ignored) super obvious cues about established design, like left-aligning buttons at the bottom of a form in her mockups when literally all other form buttons were right-aligned.
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Feb 2, 2020 20:04
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Yeah, no complaints about my design team and while they make mistakes I don't disparage then for it. They expect me to tell them when I don't like something, especially if it feels awkward to use in practice but seems good on paper. I think the only thing that I've insisted they do differently that they just don't loving do is stop the red/yellow/green system for error/warning/success. Especially in small places like an icon next to an item on a long list of small items. But other than that they've been really good and helpful. One of them even provides the css with all his wireframes which takes a ton of the effort off of me. Nobody tells him he has to, he just does.
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Feb 2, 2020 23:27
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What's stopping the designers from learning to code? I'm not convinced the penguins-on-the-iceberg thing's real. Coding's not some alien thing that only coders can do. Just do it. Don't be a stranger. Castes are lame.
Dominoes fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 3, 2020 03:39
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Dominoes posted:What's stopping the designers from learning to code? I'm not convinced the penguins-on-the-iceberg thing's real. Coding's not some alien thing that only coders can do. Just do it. Don't be a stranger. Castes are lame. Probably the same reason most developers don’t learn good UI design skills: there are a finite number of hours in a day.
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Feb 3, 2020 03:59
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I'm suspicious that you could learn an eye-opening amount of a different skill in a few days/weeks by learning after work, or if that doesn't suit your fancy, skipping meetings or deleting emails instead of replying to them. A fixed investment now for a continual payoff from a permanently broadened perspective. Your identity as a title that goes on resume doesn't matter. It's not you. Expand. Learn more. Get out of your box. Dominoes fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 3, 2020 04:01
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Dominoes posted:I'm suspicious that you could learn an eye-opening amount of a different skill in a few days/weeks by learning after work, or if that doesn't suit your fancy, skipping meetings or deleting emails instead of replying to them. A fixed investment now for a continual payoff from a permanently broadened perspective. So why aren't you a <insert profession here> in addition to being a developer?
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Feb 3, 2020 04:08
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I'm referring to skills that complement and are related to each other, are easily learned independently, and aren't formally protected.
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Feb 3, 2020 04:12
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Okay. So why aren't you also a <insert profession that involves complementary and related skills to software development>? What's good for the goose is good for the gander, friend.
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Feb 3, 2020 04:14
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Try being a good developer instead.
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Feb 3, 2020 04:49
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Dominoes posted:What's stopping the designers from learning to code? I'm not convinced the penguins-on-the-iceberg thing's real. Coding's not some alien thing that only coders can do. Just do it. Don't be a stranger. Castes are lame. Many designers have learned to code and many coders have learned to design. Generally, that's not who someone would be complaining about in this thread.
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Feb 3, 2020 04:52
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Most designers I've worked with know some HTML and CSS but I don't want them touching the project CSS because it's not their primary focus. Plus the way I like CSS written and organized seems to change on about a yearly basis.
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Feb 3, 2020 06:11
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so, because i'm an old, what's your definition of the "css-in-js debate"? like is it that the style of a component is in the component itself or specifically that you're using js to write your css? so like, my gut is "single responsibility principle" and I figure a component should style only what it is responsible for. I sometimes read people are like setting font styles on the component and I knee jerk "you fucker the global style is responsible for that use classes you dork" but then I guess you're not styling on the component anymore? I dunno, I've been using svelte and write css in those components to make things work, but it's fairly sparse is that the argument we're having about it for just the general "I want to write css by writing js"?
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Feb 3, 2020 07:58
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PlaneGuy posted:so, because i'm an old, what's your definition of the "css-in-js debate"? like is it that the style of a component is in the component itself or specifically that you're using js to write your css? the css isn't in a .css file, but it's somehow in a js file. it's yet another case of people getting angry about things that don't really matter as long as they're used properly when the project mandates it
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Feb 3, 2020 13:51
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Inacio posted:the css isn't in a .css file, but it's somehow in a js file. Hey man, haven't you heard? EVERY programming argument is a religious argument.
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Feb 3, 2020 14:24
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Dominoes posted:What's stopping the designers from learning to code? I'm not convinced the penguins-on-the-iceberg thing's real. Coding's not some alien thing that only coders can do. Just do it. Don't be a stranger. Castes are lame. Having been a programming tutor for a year when I was in college, I will say that for a lot of people, yeah it absolutely is an alien thing that they just don't get. To be clear, this isn't about castes; there are plenty of people employed as coders who can't code, and plenty of people employed as designers who can code or who could potentially learn to code. But "just do it" isn't realistic for everyone. Plenty of people just can't learn to code, or at least can't do so easily.
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Feb 3, 2020 14:54
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It's good for a design team to have someone that understands coding process, and it's good for a coding team to have someone that understands design process, but it's not necessary for either of them to be good at the other skill and it's definitely not necessary for everyone on both teams to be skilled as such.
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Feb 3, 2020 15:14
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CSS in js sucks because it makes it hard for me to block annoying dom elements using ublock origin. I suspect most website publishers think of that as a feature though.
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Feb 3, 2020 15:23
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Chenghiz posted:CSS in js sucks because it makes it hard for me to block annoying dom elements using ublock origin. I suspect most website publishers think of that as a feature though. that has never stopped me. apply yourself
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Feb 3, 2020 16:01
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PlaneGuy posted:so, because i'm an old, what's your definition of the "css-in-js debate"? like is it that the style of a component is in the component itself or specifically that you're using js to write your css? Is this completely ignoring mixins and CSS variables? This stuff has developed to cover these issues: how to have global consistency but permit tweaking at the element level.
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Feb 3, 2020 16:28
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Cascading was a mistake
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Feb 3, 2020 17:24
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prom candy posted:Cascading was a mistake Cascading is virtuous but the real world is nasty many people would replace cascading with a much more complex system and them look at you and say "see? I fixed it" - Its not soo much that is complex or simple but the type - is a abstract idea and people like ideas that don't require mental figuration I have to imagine what people really want is these "list of properties" from IDEs like Visual Basic with a long list of properties for a object so if you set "text type - bold" it would always show bold - ignoring any type of inheritance - But we fought against IDE's for web design and they lost 
Tei fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 3, 2020 17:38
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Inacio posted:that has never stopped me. apply yourself Have you figured out how to get rid of the "OH GOD PLEASE CREATE AN ACCOUNT SO OUR USER NUMBER GO UP" modal on Medium?
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Feb 3, 2020 17:54
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Munkeymon posted:Have you figured out how to get rid of the "OH GOD PLEASE CREATE AN ACCOUNT SO OUR USER NUMBER GO UP" modal on Medium?  this thing at the bottom? if so, code:
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Feb 3, 2020 18:32
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