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I actually haven't had good experience with most of this on the graphic design and UI front. If I'm building, say, a Rails web app, I want my front-end stuff t
by ufmace 4y ago
I actually haven't had good experience with most of this on the graphic design and UI front.
If I'm building, say, a Rails web app, I want my front-end stuff to integrate with Rails reasonably well. Which means ERB or HAML templates with common elements properly extracted out into shared views, maintainable CSS in SASS, that sort of thing. What most of these UI services and contractors seem to actually deliver is something quite different.
99designs output is literally just an image of what they think your website should look like. Actually writing all of the HTML and CSS to make it actually look like that is up to you. It makes me think, why am I paying money for a picture of what my site could look like that requires me to do all of the actual work?
Most entry-level contractors seem to want to deliver self-contained HTML and CSS that are usually written with some tool that creates incomprehensible actual code. They have no clue about templating and extracting common elements out. This means that I have to basically rewrite whatever they deliver to actually integrate with the web app. Which again makes me think, why am I paying for this?
IMO, if I'm going to pay someone for front-end design work, I want to be able to point them at my Github repo, with a functional site with ugly basic HTML, say basically "make this look pretty", and they open a PR with their work which works with my existing templates to add the appropriate HTML structure and CSS classes and IDs, and CSS, fonts and images all in the right places for the framework I'm using. I'm willing to help and provide advice and guidance, but I don't want to take delivery of something completely unsuited and have to integrate it myself.
As a side note, if anyone's looking to get into web design, if you learn enough about coding to do the above and are also great at making websites look good, I expect you'll have boatloads of money thrown at you.
- lolinder 4y agoThe skills required to design something that looks good and provides a good experience for users are orthogonal to the skills required to build well-factored, responsive HTML and CSS. I've worked with marketing teams that tried to build their own HTML and CSS and ended up getting something that looked great... as long as you viewed it at the exact resolution of their designer's monitor. I had to go in and make it all work on mobile, which was a nightmare because their markup and styles were so badly organized. It took as much work as if they'd just given me PNGs. More recently I received a bunch of designs from a designer who worked in Adobe XD. The designs were great, and what I got from XD was an interactive template and some very rough auto-generated CSS (mostly colors, fonts, and border radii). This was the sweet spot for me: no breaking out the color picker or guessing what letter-spacing they're using, but I could make the code work with my templating engine and make it responsive without having to rewrite bad code that they charged me for. If you can find a designer that is great at both design and code, awesome! Keep them! But if not, chances are the most productive workflow is to let them do what they do best and just plan on doing the rest.
- hallomisky 4y ago> 99designs output is literally just an image of what they think your website should look like. Actually writing all of the HTML and CSS to make it actually look like that is up to you. It makes me think, why am I paying money for a picture of what my site could look like that requires me to do all of the actual work? This implies that design is not work. Strange, on a tech website, to encounter someone who doesn't realize that design and implementation are two separate jobs.
- Tabular-Iceberg 4y agoIt's not so much that designing isn't work. Arguably it's much harder work than writing HTML and CSS. The problem is that a lot of that work is wasted when all you produce is an example image. A lot of important design decisions, like tracking and leading, doesn't show well in a PNG. I'm not saying all designers should know and deliver their designs in HTML and CSS. In fact it's probably better if they don't and instead focus on designing. But I do expect them to effectively communicating their design decisions in a way that makes them implementable in HTML and CSS by reasonable people. Chucking a PNG over the fence and calling it a day is just lazy and unprofessional.
- hallomisky 4y agoYes, that makes sense. A design delivered in e.g. figma format, which allows you to see measurements, colours, etc., would be the preferred outcome.
- lolinder 4y agoAgreed on PNGs, but the original poster that the parent was replying to was even complaining about designers who give them HTML and CSS, because the HTML/CSS is auto-generated and isn't production-ready. They expected to hire a frontend developer who is also a good designer. The parent's point is that this is unreasonable: they're separate jobs and completely separate skillsets. (Not that such people don't exist, it's just not the norm.)
- innocentoldguy 4y agoI've had pretty good experiences with TailwindCSS in both Rails and Phoenix. I did customize my auto-generated templates though, so perhaps that is why.