4 ms·

The people I see the most who want to break the grid are the people it's supposed to be helping: designers, not developers. I've spent years wearing both shoes

by colmvp 5y ago

The people I see the most who want to break the grid are the people it's supposed to be helping: designers, not developers. I've spent years wearing both shoes. As a designer, sometimes designs felt like they were too boring when everything fit cleanly in the grid. So I would break it to please my CDs who wanted to win awards and woo a client. When I moved into front end development... holy fuck did I ever hate it when designers would send designs with super custom sections that broke the grid. Great, more CSS that we're probably not going to re-use anywhere else.

dgb23 5y ago
Clearly communicated and well structured designs are golden. I don't mind breaking old rules as long as the new rules are clear and actually work.
- colmvp 5y ago
  I don't disagree, but "clearly communicated and well structured" seem to be a very difficult standard for design teams. I work with designers both internally at my company and designers from listed companies who provide us designers and so often they fall into the trap of designing something that looks great when everything is perfect (i.e. headlines are reasonable, photos are beautiful, content neatly wraps the container) and then fall short when reality hits, i.e. the photos the client wants to use is very visually unimpressive, headlines are much more lengthy than the design accounted for and can't be cut because of legal/marketing reasons, some entries don't have all fields... Invariably it's often me who fixes their shortcomings. They are fortunate that I have a lot of design experience so I know how to improvise on the fly. But really, it shouldn't have gotten to this point, it's trivial to study the true type of content a site or app is going to use, and make the design resilient to the type of variations that are likely to occur given the type of content. How does this relate to grid breaking? Well a lot of these same designers don't care for systems and this is just a symptom of that. Might as well throw out that style guide they gave me because they aren't even following their own rules, be it the grid they provided, the specific font sizes they use, spacing, etc.

by colmvp 5y ago

dgb23 5y ago

Clearly communicated and well structured designs are golden. I don't mind breaking old rules as long as the new rules are clear and actually work.

colmvp 5y ago
I don't disagree, but "clearly communicated and well structured" seem to be a very difficult standard for design teams. I work with designers both internally at my company and designers from listed companies who provide us designers and so often they fall into the trap of designing something that looks great when everything is perfect (i.e. headlines are reasonable, photos are beautiful, content neatly wraps the container) and then fall short when reality hits, i.e. the photos the client wants to use is very visually unimpressive, headlines are much more lengthy than the design accounted for and can't be cut because of legal/marketing reasons, some entries don't have all fields... Invariably it's often me who fixes their shortcomings. They are fortunate that I have a lot of design experience so I know how to improvise on the fly. But really, it shouldn't have gotten to this point, it's trivial to study the true type of content a site or app is going to use, and make the design resilient to the type of variations that are likely to occur given the type of content. How does this relate to grid breaking? Well a lot of these same designers don't care for systems and this is just a symptom of that. Might as well throw out that style guide they gave me because they aren't even following their own rules, be it the grid they provided, the specific font sizes they use, spacing, etc.