As a frontend developer I've found the best designers have some development experience and likewise a good UI developer should have some basic understanding of

As a frontend developer I've found the best designers have some development experience and likewise a good UI developer should have some basic understanding of UI design. As a quick example at one place I was working a designer came up with this beautiful new site menu which I was asked to implement. Lots of animations. Items would slowly disappear depending on the space available. Things would resize and move around the menu necessary to look right. From a design perspective it worked great, but as a developer I knew it was going to be a nightmare. I knew even if I could build it as intended it would be overly complex, prone to bugs and difficult to maintain. A good design (and designer) is one that considers the limitations (and possibilities) of the technology and designs with those in mind. Similarly I've seen great designers who understand the technological constraints well have their designs ruined by developers who implement them without care. For example, making sure things line up correctly or that padding and margins are correct and consistent are things that I see bad frontend developers miss a lot. In my experience the best way to work is by sitting the developer and designer next to each other. It's less about tooling and more about communication. Ideally a designer should be asking questions about how easy something will be to implement as they're working on the designs, and a developer should be asking questions and showing their progress as they implement. This way you avoid situations where designers are building things that are overly complicated to implement and developers can implement the designs as intended while being able to flag up any challenges that might arise during implementation. The absolute worse way to work is to ask a designer with little understanding of the system to design something. Then once they're done send that design to a developer who has no direct line of contact with the designer to build it. I've seen this done before and every time it results in bad designs and bad implementations - regardless of the ability of the individuals involved. In my personal experience there's zero tension between myself and designers. The tension for me is when I'm not able to work as closely with a designer as I'd like to because I know I'm going to produce substandard work which I don't really want to put my name to.