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Hmm. I can say with certainty that the great designers I've worked with have never had to make requests like this. They understand the idea that all sites shoul

Hmm. I can say with certainty that the great designers I've worked with have never had to make requests like this. They understand the idea that all sites should be built out of reusable components, and the visual relationships between those components should flow across the whole site. The CSS is robust and working site wide, the code is simple and beautiful and the design/UX is great, everyone is working efficiently - and everything flows from it. But any time you have to budge a button -3px, increase some front size 1px, tweak that padding there, fiddle with the line spacing on that subheading, or satisfy some other pixel pushing whimsy ... then the design has failed, the designer doesn't understand the medium. Usually these sorts of requests come from mediocre designers who feel professionally threatened by a rapidly evolving scene and then feel the need to create a sort fake value for their role by insisting on such things. Very often such behaviour will come along with the sentiments expressed in OP's article, some sort of implied idea that they have the sole understanding of aesthetic value or what can be considered "delightful".

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
I really doubt you have worked with designers at all, let along great ones. Any designer, junior or senior, that I've worked with, won't ignore the small stuff, and the better designers are more likely to be perfectionists. > Usually these sorts of requests come from mediocre designers who feel professionally threatened by a rapidly evolving scene and then feel the need to create a sort fake value for their role by insisting on such things. This is such an immature comment I don't even know how to respond. A designer that was so deferential to developer to not sweat pixel alignment would simply not even get hired in the design studio I've worked with.
- Wintamute 13y ago
  You've missed my point, and resorted to ad hominem. Way to go. I'm not saying that the little things aren't important, its great to be a perfectionist and I think sites are absolutely built out of details by designers and developers working in respectful partnership. But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things like consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes. In my experience this is where good designers spend their energies - and if its done well pixel pushing should not be required. I just responded to the point you were making in a polite manner, without calling you immature or calling your professional experience into question. Now do you fancy having a go?
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    I did not call you immature, I called your comment immature. You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments, and so I seriously doubt you have significant experience working with designers. > But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things like consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes. In my experience this is where good designers spend their energies - and if its done well pixel pushing should not be required. Pixel pushing is ALWAYS required at some point; it is unavoidable given our current technology. A designer cannot magically come up with a generic responsive design because developers just can't make that happen (through no fault of their own). Take for example icon design: it is well known that vector graphics are quite limited and bitmap icons must be generated and manually red lined for various resolutions. That is work the designer (or production specialist) does. Similarly, size-independent layouts are also a pipe dream, not because the designer is incapable, but the frameworks are! Hence, we are stuck optimizing layouts and pixel alignments for multiple sizes manually. tl;dr "consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes" is very often not workable in the real world for any non-trivial design. Hackernews is surprisingly quite anti-designer in posting sentiment.
    - Wintamute 13y ago
      Can a comment itself be immature? I'm pretty sure only a commenter has the agency to be immature, but anyway that's beside the point :) > You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments Nope, at no point did I ever criticise designers who care about pixel alignments. I criticised designers who place too much value on pixel pushing at the end of a project - for me it's often a red flag. Admittedly where an approach involving "consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes" works best are for projects more towards the web app end of the spectrum, I will concede that point, but it doesn't mean the design has to be trivial.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

I really doubt you have worked with designers at all, let along great ones. Any designer, junior or senior, that I've worked with, won't ignore the small stuff, and the better designers are more likely to be perfectionists. > Usually these sorts of requests come from mediocre designers who feel professionally threatened by a rapidly evolving scene and then feel the need to create a sort fake value for their role by insisting on such things. This is such an immature comment I don't even know how to respond. A designer that was so deferential to developer to not sweat pixel alignment would simply not even get hired in the design studio I've worked with.

Wintamute 13y ago
You've missed my point, and resorted to ad hominem. Way to go. I'm not saying that the little things aren't important, its great to be a perfectionist and I think sites are absolutely built out of details by designers and developers working in respectful partnership. But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things like consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes. In my experience this is where good designers spend their energies - and if its done well pixel pushing should not be required. I just responded to the point you were making in a polite manner, without calling you immature or calling your professional experience into question. Now do you fancy having a go?
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  I did not call you immature, I called your comment immature. You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments, and so I seriously doubt you have significant experience working with designers. > But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things like consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes. In my experience this is where good designers spend their energies - and if its done well pixel pushing should not be required. Pixel pushing is ALWAYS required at some point; it is unavoidable given our current technology. A designer cannot magically come up with a generic responsive design because developers just can't make that happen (through no fault of their own). Take for example icon design: it is well known that vector graphics are quite limited and bitmap icons must be generated and manually red lined for various resolutions. That is work the designer (or production specialist) does. Similarly, size-independent layouts are also a pipe dream, not because the designer is incapable, but the frameworks are! Hence, we are stuck optimizing layouts and pixel alignments for multiple sizes manually. tl;dr "consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes" is very often not workable in the real world for any non-trivial design. Hackernews is surprisingly quite anti-designer in posting sentiment.
  - Wintamute 13y ago
    Can a comment itself be immature? I'm pretty sure only a commenter has the agency to be immature, but anyway that's beside the point :) > You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments Nope, at no point did I ever criticise designers who care about pixel alignments. I criticised designers who place too much value on pixel pushing at the end of a project - for me it's often a red flag. Admittedly where an approach involving "consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes" works best are for projects more towards the web app end of the spectrum, I will concede that point, but it doesn't mean the design has to be trivial.