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I wish you lots of luck in finding these mythical designers out there to work with throughout your entire web development career. You can spend plenty of time t

I wish you lots of luck in finding these mythical designers out there to work with throughout your entire web development career. You can spend plenty of time thinking of how things ought to be but the flexibility of CSS and HTML will always be utilized in real world applications where it's practical. Asking for a few more iterations from the design team to make their concepts fit your teams existing set of baked utility classes or even their own style guide (issued more than a few months ago) instead of simply writing a few more lines of CSS is not a good trade off in the eyes of most everybody including many developers.

deltron3030 7y ago
The design team is responsible for the baked in utility classes in that case, therefore I don't really understand your point.
- mattacular 7y ago
  My point is design teams that do CSS are rare. I've actually never heard of this unless it's a designer who is now working as a developer, on a development teams.
  - harimau777 7y ago
    I agree that most design teams are not going to actually write CSS. However, it seems reasonable to me to expect them to organize and communicate their design in terms of classes. I see two advantages to that approach: - It requires the design team to take responsibility for structuring the design. E.g. determining parts of the UI that share the same design and defining a hierarchy of design elements. - It makes the work that the design team is creating for the engineers more transparent. Communication can be something like "this new wireframe requires 5 new classes" rather than something vague like "just tweak the styles we used for the other components to fit this new wireframe".
harimau777 7y ago
Is that really the case though? With flex box and grids it seems like it should be as simple as making sure that your design is based on proportions instead of static values (e.g. "evenly space the three columns across 80% of the page" instead of "Make three columns separated by 10pt with 30 pt before the first column and after the last"). It also seems like it's a whole lot easier to make changes to a wireframe than to fight with CSS rules.
- mattacular 7y ago
  It's been the case in my experience working with designers who themselves work with product owners. When there is a business urgency around a new feature or design then pushback from the dev team because they dont want to modify CSS or write an ad hoc class isn't likely to be successful.

deltron3030 7y ago

The design team is responsible for the baked in utility classes in that case, therefore I don't really understand your point.

mattacular 7y ago
My point is design teams that do CSS are rare. I've actually never heard of this unless it's a designer who is now working as a developer, on a development teams.
- harimau777 7y ago
  I agree that most design teams are not going to actually write CSS. However, it seems reasonable to me to expect them to organize and communicate their design in terms of classes. I see two advantages to that approach: - It requires the design team to take responsibility for structuring the design. E.g. determining parts of the UI that share the same design and defining a hierarchy of design elements. - It makes the work that the design team is creating for the engineers more transparent. Communication can be something like "this new wireframe requires 5 new classes" rather than something vague like "just tweak the styles we used for the other components to fit this new wireframe".

harimau777 7y ago

Is that really the case though? With flex box and grids it seems like it should be as simple as making sure that your design is based on proportions instead of static values (e.g. "evenly space the three columns across 80% of the page" instead of "Make three columns separated by 10pt with 30 pt before the first column and after the last"). It also seems like it's a whole lot easier to make changes to a wireframe than to fight with CSS rules.

mattacular 7y ago
It's been the case in my experience working with designers who themselves work with product owners. When there is a business urgency around a new feature or design then pushback from the dev team because they dont want to modify CSS or write an ad hoc class isn't likely to be successful.