What do web designers do for your projects?

Question

I've been working for a small company for about a year now (I'm college student and it's my first job as a developer). We work on small - medium sized web projects, team sizes are about 1 - 5 ppl, and we all work from home. I use ASP.NET MVC.

I've worked on a several projects now, and I'm not impressed by what our designers delivered. Most of the time, it's basically just a frame of the page, with a few headers, paragraphs etc. or a title page. This last one I worked with couldn't even make HTML from the graphics he created.

So the question is: what do designers do for your project?

Should I expect more from them? Should they make design for every page of the project, or one for different types of pages (for example one design for all forms)? How often should I meet with them (note that I work from home, so I don't see people I work with ever day)?

Answer 1

Most designers I know don't have a clue about HTML. I wouldn't expect them to. Designers primary role is to design, not to implement. My job (probably yours as well) is to translate their graphics to code.

Same goes for product managers, I wouldn't expect them to know or even care how I write my code or which framework I'm using - they want their vision to be implemented.

Answer 2

Where I work the Web Designer understands both HTML and CSS in depth, so when we develop we care nothing about design. So we send the raw aspx file to the designer and the magic happens. I really like this aproach, because I can focus on the business rules of the application, instead of caring about design (wich I really suck at).

But there is a difference between a designer and a web designer. Perhaps designers shouldn't care how to implement things in HTML, but a web designer should.

Answer 3

Our designer does everything from Photoshop mockups to HTML and CSS coding of his approved designs. Maybe he does too much...

Answer 4

What the hell is wrong with your designer? Is he a web designer or a graphics designer? There's a large difference in the two. A guy delivering just a graphic of the page with a few basic headers seems like he is graphic oriented at best and incompetent at worst.

Web Designers would know HTML, Image Splicing, CSS etc in my book. Graphics designers may render concepts and wireframes though Web Designers should be able to do this too.

Fire your designers and get true Web Designers who know HTML, CSS, light JavaScript, color matching and patterning, UI/UX and you'll be set.

Most websites don't need graphical artists etc; they need someone who can design a WEB PAGE and is in tune with user needs.

Answer 5

A truly good web designer will basically handle the presentation layer. They will come up with (either by doing it from scratch themselves or using resources they know about; you probably don't need to care) the layout, color scheme, icons, etc. They will write the HTML and CSS, and if you're really getting your money's worth, they'll handle the JavaScript, too.

As importantly (or more importantly), they will help design the interactions in the system. This is likely where you will need to work with them to most to make sure the front end and back end of the system are working hand-in-hand instead of against one another.

Sadly, a lot of times you just wind up with "Here's some photoshop mockups". There's a little bit of value here, but nothing like what I've described above.

Answer 6

As a freelance web designer, I'm going to say it depends. The bare minimum that should be created is an image mockup that meets your page requirements and is at the resolution of the page (i.e. if you asked for a page design fixed at 1024 pixels wide, the mockup needs to be 1024 pixels wide). This will make it easy for them/you to translate the mockup into code.

Beyond that, any good web designer will also be able to cut the mockup up into HTML/CSS, code the Javascript interactions (eye-candy and business) and even perform simple integration with your back-end (i.e. insert code snippets to pull values from your objects).

As to the number of page designs, this is also a requirement that has to be defined by the project. The more unique designs that are required, the more time it takes and time = money.

One key factor to make sure everyone is happy with the design is quick iterations. The more often you can see what the designer is doing, the faster you can identify elements you do and don't like. This will prevent the designer from wasting time on a concept that doesn't work for your business.

At the end of the day, the fact that anyone can open up Photoshop and have it export the HTML automatically from an image explains the huge range of skills across web designers...

Answer 7

From experience, its good for a web designer to know the capabilities of html and css, I've worked with designers who haven't a clue about the web therefore designing something which can't be done.

Then again, I don't think designers should be the ones to the html and css, what if there's technical aspects they don't understand in regards to jquery etc? Also will they bother about W3C standards and compatibility issues?

I think developers should stick to the code and designers should simply design but also dabble in user research, there's no need for them to code. A decent developer should be able to take a graphic and make it pixel perfect. In my experience anyway...

Answer 8

Him (graphics designer): Here is my start page design.
Me (web developer/designer): Cool, nice with all that whitespace but it needs to be more compact. Him: Why!? Whitespace is really important for any design.
Me: I know but most people will watch this with a laptop resolution, the will need to scroll down to see the whole splash image and read any text.

Me: Here you go, a sketch with the page content.
Him: OMG, too much clutter, we must remove a lot of the text.
Me: Yeah, I know but that's not an option since we already done that. We have to separate the content i smart ways, maybe use some Jquery magic on some parts.
Him: Eh, ok....

Him: Here is my product page mockup.
Me: Hm, it's nice to crop the product image like that but the guys uploading the pictures dont have photoshop and even if I would implement some cropping solutin in the admin, I dont know if they have the design skills to crop it in a good way.

etc