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.

I think it is extremely common that designers don’t understand development. It is even more common that developers do not understand design.

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.