Working as an online team part 3: The Designer-Developer Relationship.

This blog post will outline tips for a Developer (with limited design skills) and a graphic designer (with little or no Web knowledge). For each suggestion I'll be giving it a more personal touch: By recalling experiences with Designers I've worked alongside.

1. Become Friends

Don’t be too professional. What kind of partnership is it when the two of you aren’t getting along or you’re both being too serious all the time? Regardless, if you’re both starting out your careers or you’re seasoned pros, you should still be getting to know each other.

I always make a point of getting to know the designer I work with. There was one I worked with very closely for over a year on multiple projects, we worked incredibly well together despite having opposing skills – he couldn’t write a line of code, I couldn’t design a button! But we got our work done and we achieved success in our roles.

Friendship is the best way to form any successful partnership.

2. Be Detailed and Keep Being Detailed.

Despite the fact you could have been working together for quite some period of time, there maybe still some skills each of you haven’t (and maybe never will) pick up.

For me, as a developer, it’s colours. Why oh why can I still not get this right? I ask myself. I have a few I like for background colours, links, and regular text but designers instantly know which colours are suitable anywhere on a site. I need designers to tell me to exact hexadecimal value to use – “pick a light blue” just won’t work.

For designers I find it’s always something small, yet hugely irritating, such as: The want, need, and dependency on Flash. This is because designers are more suited to Flash (minus the ActionScript) and since they want to be involved they will suggest using it quite a few times. Unnecessarily using Flash solutions causes problems.

Designers and developers should always be detailed in what exactly they need from each other while working on a project and explain why.

3. Don’t Rely on Emails for Communication

If you both work in the same office, your first mode of communication should be speech. Not email, not instant messenger (IM), not the phone, and not Twitter. Even if you’ll be off your feet most of the day running back-and-forth to each other’s desk you’ll get a lot more done.

Personally, I always hated IM, I dislike trying to ‘instantly’ explain something to someone when I can’t see what they’re looking at on their screen. Having to reply instantly is even worse, especially if you haven’t a clue what the other person is talking about.

Email is good but we all know one big disadvantage to email: Not everyone checks all their emails. Or, in my case, I check it, click on other one, and then completely forget I looked at the first one.

The phone causes misunderstanding all the time. I’d like to say it causes more of them then email etc. but at least, with the phone, tone can be detected. With emails, IM, Twitter, Google Wave etc. people’s reactions are based on not how you wrote something but how they read it. We’ve all been on both sides on that fence.

There was a designer that I used to run down a flight of stairs to talk to. I always felt it necessary as the idea of being specific about a request or revision as having to send emails back-and-forth to each other before we finally got on the same page really didn’t appeal to me.

Instant messenger is not a desired method in communicating. Email breaks a conversation too easily. The phone can be awkward. Twitter with its one-hundred-and-forty character limit is not the most ideal format for a detailed instruction. The best form of communication is talking to one another.

4. Disagree with Each Other.

In the second point, I mentioned there will be skills you’ll probably never learn but just because both of you began with different skill-sets doesn’t mean some traits won’t rub off on the other. I knew a graphic designer, who previously made print ads, and he learned a shockingly impressive amount about web usability.

As for myself, I may struggle with my colour selection, but that doesn’t mean I can’t improve a graphic concept: Whether it’s positioning an element on the page or deciding on the appropriate size of a background gradient.

Developers with limited design skills can still have an eye for improving a design, whereas designers with limited web knowledge can learn new skills without too much difficultly.

5. Five

Well, the other two parts to this blog had five points each – I’m just trying to be consistent.

If you haven’t figured it out, the designers I mentioned above are all the same person (Cue “The Pixies – Where’s My Mind” music). I formed a great professional relationship with someone which had started out as both of us having skills-sets that were complete polar opposites and we went on to learn from each other and we worked very very well together.

I believe, as long as you can stay friends, be detailed, communicate well, and disagree (without arguing) you’re always on to a winning formula.

That’s concludes the third part of this series. Next week is the final one. It’ll discuss the management-staff relationship.

Have any stories yourself? Like the article? Please leave a comment below.

Tags: communication/designers/developers/Google Wave/IM/partnership/Twitter/web design/web development
Posted in Blog by John |