As a self-identifying "coder who can't design", I'm willing to offer a few explanations (though not necessarily excuses) for some of the behaviors the OP descri

As a self-identifying "coder who can't design", I'm willing to offer a few explanations (though not necessarily excuses) for some of the behaviors the OP describes, at least as far as my experience goes--if only to explain where I'm coming from when I do things that are obviously wrong to people with more designer experience. :) I'll take them one by one. > Need a Photoshop mockup for every single screen, including the "I forgot my password" dialog and the Terms of Use page Designers, in my experience, like to keep a design consistent--just as we coders like to keep the code organized and generalized with as few special cases as possible. If and when I would do something like this--which I've never done for things as obvious as these examples--it's because I'm not sure if the designer would want me to change it later because whatever I came up with wouldn't look good in context. If I have some obvious model to work from, however (like, for example, a login page for a forgot password page), I would base it on that--after all, isn't that what stylesheets are meant to simplify in the first place? > Assign different values at random to every margins and paddings In my experience, this can happen because margin and padding--and indeed, many other concepts in CSS--are rather opaque if you're not familiar with how print design works. I know when I work with CSS, it involves a lot of trial and error to puzzle out exactly how to implement something, not helped by the fact that different kinds of elements are affected by margin/padding in different, non-trivial ways. > Think 11px is the perfect size for body copy (and 14px is great for headlines) This is a bit of an extreme example, but similar problems I encounter work like this: I try it in 11px, realize it looks awful, and then don't know how to make it better. In the case of something as obvious as text size, I'd experimentally make it larger and see if that improves it. But in less obvious cases, I often do find myself thinking "this is ugly but I don't know how to improve it", and then show it to a designer, get a better mockup back and implement that. > Ask you to export a background image even for a 1px black line I've never done this one, I know about border: 1px solid black. :) If I were newer to CSS, I might Google CSS rules to figure out how to do it. > Do not understand the concept of aligning things together I'm willing to bet that this often happens because many things that seem like they should be simple alignment-wise in CSS is a bitch, and falling back to tables feels dirty. (Most engineers I know, in the absence of knowledge otherwise, would assume that a rule named "vertical-align" would do what it says in more cases than it does.) I admit without reservation that these are all things I should understand better, and I'm constantly learning new patterns for improving designs as I work. However, they don't come naturally to me, so they're things I have to learn with the guidance of someone to whom it does.