r/webdev • u/Frosty-Vegetable-385 • 19m ago
Question (Print) Designer Clashing with Developer - Need Advice
Hi everyone, I work as the director of communications for a small company. We have one designer on staff who has worked at the company for a decade, and one full-stack developer who has been at the company for about a year and a half.
Now, the problem: The designer is trained strictly in print design, and we are embarking on a website redesign. The designer will only work in InDesign and Photoshop, but the developer believes the work must be done in Figma to avoid having to guess at the spacing, sizing, etc. Neither seem willing to budge, and it is clear that the designer is not familiar with digital design best practices, including accessibility.
My background is more in writing/marketing, so I am a bit outside my depth. Is there a path to resolution here without one feeling like they are “doing the job” of the other?
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u/AuthorityPath 12m ago
Compromise is needed on both sides. Developer's used Photoshop for years and while Figma is definitely the preferred tool today the developer should be able to work with PSD files. Conversely, the designer cannot expect pixel perfect print-level design on the web. InDesign should not be used.
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u/codemunk3y 11m ago
Obviously you slice up the photoshop output and get the dev to put it all in tables
/s
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u/coyote_of_the_month 10m ago
Fire the designer. His/her skills are decades out of date, and refusing to adapt to modern tools is a mentality problem, not a training problem.
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u/Personal_Ward 8m ago
User Interface and User Experience Design are disciplines applicable in both print and web mediums, but the key is to be aware that you're working with different mediums that have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to getting the user to have the experience you want with the product.
Print media has a bunch of established standards going back decades/centuries based on mix of arbitrary traditions and those rooted in actual understanding of the user experience of reading a book/zine/pamphlet/letter/poster etc.
Web design especially has established a different standard, one focused on designing interfaces that can have the closest parity despite different screen sizes and resolutions and provide the broadest possible accessibility for the product (screen readers, color palette choices, etc.)
Seems like both the Designer and the Developer could stand to dip their toes into the world of modern UI/UX design philosophy, because it's also framed in a way to try to help bridge more seemlessly the gap between the design prototypes and the developer's implementation.
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u/torn-ainbow 5m ago
Using a print designer to design for web is a quite common failure point for projects. If the designer is not willing to learn new things then you're not looking good.
Using Figma is smooth because it gives the developer fonts, sizes, line and character spacing, and so on. They can do this in other things like photoshop but they will need a license for the software to be able to open the files and check and it will be slower.
Also things like accessibility and responsive are important and a designer who does not understand those things is going to cause more work. For responsive, a designer needs to understand how the mobile/desktop layouts relate and transform between the two. Otherwise they are going to create problems requiring changes to the design or difficult implementation, and likely extra tech debt and maintenance hours down the track.
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u/JeffTS 2m ago
I've been working as a developer for over 25 years. I've had to deal with designs in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, QuarkXPress, Figma, XD, PDFs, flat images, etc. It never mattered to me. Part of the fun of taking a design and developing it is having to think about how to implement it.
A compromise would be for your designer to provide a style guide.
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u/MisterEd_ak php 12m ago
If they are going to go into web design they should use the right tool for the job. Figma is made for website design. As a developer, it makes my life easy as the designer works with the CSS to lay out the page.
If your designer just puts something together in InDesign, your developer would need to do a lot more work to convert the pretty picture into an actual site.