How designer can ease the website development

WEB DESIGN | October 12, 2016

The fact is a developer is unknown to designing sense and designers are aliens to the development process. Developers think in their own way about designing because these are two altogether different domains. But it is compulsory for any developer to work hand in hand with the designer. There is nothing better for a developer to have a designer who has a little knowledge of developing also. Design & development are fragmenting into more specialized manner.

The software is available for this type of designing, but mainly Photoshop is used for designing and it is mostly preferred by developers. PSD’s are used in designing because these are easy to understand and maintain.

How Photoshop Articulacy of Designer help Developer

Wise Way of PSD Versions

Being a designer you would be dealing with a number of PSDs. Better keep these PSDs versions wisely by rightly naming them for each file versions. You can opt for such a method that can display the versions in an alphabetical manner. Using such control system will not only manage it properly but it will also help developers sorting it out rightly.

Retain Layers

It is advisable to avoid flattening anything that can do without it. You can group / hide / show layers and then retain the document to its earlier form. Avoid destroying useful data.

Trim Unwanted Layers

You must not keep old versions, templates, duplicates and anything that is going to occupy your space and is not going to be used anywhere. Keep running through your layers and terminating anything that isn’t going to serve any purpose.

Retain Vectors, and Scalable Effects

You must have an idea how to resize your designs as per the size of devices. You may need different dimensions of artwork occasionally. So, ensure you do not have to redraw tons of bitmap art at a short period.

Leverage Layer Comps

Layer Comps in Photoshop allows you to develop packs of layer states, like position, visibility and layer style. You can utilize it to integrate various tabs in a web structure or multiple screens in a single app. You must not have duplicate group of layers and store it thus it will cut down the file size as well.

How Designers can Help Developers

You should know how to retain rounded corners during resizing the shapes.
Keep your design at 72 ppi avoid creating confusion by altering the resolution of the document.
Just ensure that you have all the required shape tools available to snap to pixels.
Don’t be confused about RGB mode as it is necessary for developers to sample colors from the relevant documents for using it in code. Using RGB wrongly may be fatal.
You must export the cut-ups for your developers for using in apps as they may not be very familiar with this.
You must take extra care about fonts and it is always suggested to place real text in apps or on the web. It should be available in most of the devices and web. Before deciding on any font, talk with your developer and client for its feasibility.
You can use anti-aliasing options to render the texts on the target platform evenly.
Keeping track of the right design dimensions is also necessary as you must know how it may affect in landscape and portrait format. Know from your developer if the application is full-screen or not to rightly use the correct design dimensions.
You must know about the user interface components and style of interaction of each platform. You must know the platform you are working for as your design should fit for it.
You need to design first for landscape and then next time for portrait orientation.
You should use genuine / realistic content instead of a dummy.
You must take into account the localization for which you should consider fifty percent difference in the width of the text, for textual component vis-à-vis English.
You should take care of the global light source which you should consider keeping in view the target’s light source.
Without compression, you should export cut-ups and avoid using JPEGs unless you are told.
You must make organizational and navigational constructs clear as developers should be abreast with the information structure at the early stage of the implementation stage.
Make it clear from your developer it the shadow effects needs to be integrated.
You need to know how to create the buttons – it could either be 3-part images, or 9-part images.

The development of any software is a winning combination of the mutual understanding and association between graphic design, interaction design, and right way of implementation. All there aspects are equally important and vital in its sense to create anything great. By having an idea of the requirement of all those who are working with us in other domains, you can be more effective and reliable in your own work.