Design Principles Are Fundamental to Web Application Development
July 8th, 2010 » 5 Comments »
If you are programming web applications you should be constantly trying to improve your quality of decision making when it comes to design implementation.
Why design is fundamental to web application development for us:
1. Design is important. Perfect functionality without good design is, at best, ugly— at worst, entirely unusable. If we pride ourselves on quality functionality, let’s dress in up in suit and tie. The impact on clients and users will be multiplied.
2. “Pixel perfect” implementation is a lackluster way to approach web design. First of all, the reality of browsers will never allow that to happen in every view without major cost bloat to product owners. Second of all, the concept exists almost solely because designers don’t trust you. Designers do a lot of legitimate work making a lot of decisions about how things should sit on the page. When those decisions aren’t translated to the web page, they feel slighted and frustrated. So they hang the idea of pixel perfection over our heads. Instead, let’s respect the designers position in the process. We can do this by learning about the craft of UX, Typography and Grid-based Design— as well as Color Theory. We can also do this by communicating to the product owner that we know that their design is important and that we intend to be faithful to it. Rather than blindly committing to pixel perfection, let’s commit to understanding the style guide, layout, and type decisions and budgeting meaningful time and effort to implement the site correctly.
3. By understanding design fundamentals and CSS techniques, doing our jobs well will become easier. Pixel perfection can be a cop-out for us too. We think that we will just match the design perfectly without thought. But how many of us are surprised at our inaccuracies when we overlay our work with that of the designer? By understanding design basics, we can mentally categorize design decisions that our clients have made and more accurately predict such things as fonts, font size, padding, margins, widths, etc.
Bravo! This is spot on – most all of us think in pictures, so visual design is the de-facto interface between us programmers and the people who pay us to build software. Frameworks and standards allow the design to be as dynamic as a good conversation.
There is no room for bad design on a competitive website. If you don’t apply UX basics and good design, your customers can switch to another website in seconds. A good book that goes over the basics is Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird. There are tons of other good resources on the web too so there is no excuse for ulgy web design.
1. …”If we pride ourselves on quality functionality, let’s dress in up in suit and tie.”
Apparently I’m reading the tone on this wrong, but I hope you aren’t implying that all design does is dress things up in pretty clothes.
2. “Pixel perfect” implementation is a lackluster way to approach web design. First of all, the reality of browsers will never allow that to happen in every view without major cost bloat to product owners. Second of all, the concept exists almost solely because designers don’t trust you.
- What are you basing this on? I personally take pixel-perfection off the plate for anything outside of flash applications. I think its a small subset of designers who would demand things be static and not fluidly adjust based on a variety of parameters such as browser or accessibility.
…Designers do a lot of legitimate work making a lot of decisions about how things should sit on the page. When those decisions aren’t translated to the web page, they feel slighted and frustrated. So they hang the idea of pixel perfection over our heads…
- Again, why this generalization of the bitter designer who gets his feelings hurt and can’t accept things not going his way? I think the article’s argument that developers need to be more aware of the design process is also saying that designers don’t understand the dev process either, which I don’t think is as frequent a problem.
So, when I tweeted earlier about how “off the mark” this was, I was reading the tone as something like “We can do design too, its not that hard to figure it out” but apparently, and I hope this is right, this is more about working more closely with designers and understanding what they do, not as a replacement, but as a way to be able to have the same conversation with mutual understanding. If its the 2nd interpretation, good.
Other than the few generalizations about how designers work, and how they think about devs and the development process from a design viewpoint, I suppose this is mostly right.
Mark,
There is no reason to take any offense. My intention was to quickly make a case for the importance of understanding design fundamentals as a development team so that we can execute designs most effectively, not so that we can replace designers.
The prerogative of the article was to speak empathy for the design profession to and from within a development team. Generalities are necessary to move quickly through my proposition.
Of course, I don’t prejudice designers as bitter, broken-ego contrarians. But based on your reply, I can tell that you are one. I’M KIDDING!!!
Thank you for the refining feedback.
This is entirely about working more closely with designers and understanding what they do. Integrum works with a number of 3rd party designers. Billy is one of our front end developers and has been doing a design series to help build a bridge between our development team and the designers we work with. Your second interpretation is the correct one.
I think it is extremely common that designers don’t understand development. It is even more common that developers do not understand design.