What Every Designer Should Know About Development

As someone who has worked in the web industry for over 10 years, I've seen a lot of friction between designers and developers. Though there are rare individuals who act as both developer and designer, when a project is sufficiently complex and or the timeline is compressed enough, it often requires cooperation by people who specialize in one or the other discipline. This often means a struggle between vision and execution.

As someone who went to school for design and now runs a company that specializes in development, I can sympathize with both sides. Designers want the best in user experience and developers don't want to perform unnecessary work. These goals don't have to contradict each other and especially with the volume of open source code available these days they can be quite complimentary. A good developer can be a guide for designers, helping them to find the paths of least resistance and maximum ROI. A good designer should be advocate for the users, pushing applications and websites to where they need to be.

In the spirit of better designer/developer relations, this post highlights a top 5 list of tips for how designers working with developers:

1. Design has a huge impact on project cost.
2. It can be tough to be the last person to touch something.
3. Developers think of design as black magic.
4. Don't expect to earn points by suggesting technology solutions.
5. Developers do have a horse in the race.

I'll be looking at each of these items in turn and talking about them in detail in a blog post over the next five weeks.