From 3 dev founders who made designer friends.
Edited by Jayla Kwok
Designers are “creative” and “creatives” might in some people’s mind mean #otherspeciesofhuman. Sometimes, it might seem like your articulated ideas go into a mysterious black hole of their mind, which somehow spits out a wireframe and UI design at the end of a long wait. Half of your previous encounters with this species of human probably ended up awkward or hostile.
But are designers really that irrational, illogical, or unmanageable? As a company that started out with three technical co-founders and now has a team of in-house designers, with a designer as a partner, something definitely worked out between our data structure geeks and typography fanatics. Here are three simple things you can do to instantly win a few designer friends.
Empathy for designers.
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If you’ve given a designer a brief and you visit them the next day, they probably have nothing. The day after, a few empty beer bottles. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get a design back in a week.
Designers aren’t one uniform breed. They all have different work patterns, but a good designer will devote time to research and thoroughly understanding their clients’ needs. Depending on how detailed your project brief is, your designer might be spending days researching and developing user stories before they can show you anything. Give them space.
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Our designers are enlisted to do posters, our company website, and infographics that are outside the usual UX & UI consulting. Even though our company generally understands the design process, communication is always something we’re working at. Our non-design team members may over-enthusiastically jump into design suggestions or other times not provide enough information because they don’t want to disrespect their colleagues. A simple solution is to just ask the following question:
Are there any considerations where you need more context? Is there any other information you need from me to help you work?
Design usually starts in black and white. Colors come last.
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If you are working with a UX and UI designer, then they will probably show you a wireframe first to understand the user flow. As the design progresses, they’ll also tackle technical issues, such as error pages that the user would expect to see, missing steps in in the user flow and empty states. Once the wireframe is settled, details in layouts, button designs and color schemes will be filled in to the mockups and prototypes. It might seem like a designer is just playing with colors all day long, but they are probably considering the mood implications behind the colors.
Good designers add color last.
Even though you may not get why a designer is so hung up over a specific shade of pink, it’s important to appreciate their effort. Since visuals and functionals are their forte, take your exchanges back and forth as a learning experience rather than a roadblock.
Understand basic design concepts.
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The best way to start on the right foot with designers is to show you’ve done a bit of homework and know rudimentary designing concepts. This helps you give them educated feedback and relevant information. For example, when you understand visual hierarchy, you can at least tell a designer what text you’d like a viewer to focus on. This helps focus the designer on creating a cohesive layout that can help highlight the main message. Here are some example points to start with:
- 10 User Interface Design Fundamentals to be more user-centric
- Learn how visual hierarchy guides the eye to see certain things first
- Effective Visual Communication for Graphical User Interfaces (as layouts, not just colours and pretty things)
- Learn a little typography — the key to a good designer’s heart is appreciation for typography
Don’t make assumptions. Ask questions.
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People say “assumptions make an ass out of you and me!” If your gut reaction to a proposed design is that you don’t like it, ask questions!
Since you’ve read up on basic design concepts, you can bring those principles into the discussion. For example, even though you may want all your information “accessible” to a viewer, your designer might decide on a simple splash landing page with one CTA after a month of work.
A lot of work goes into simplicity. Just as much work goes into consistency.
If you are a developer and know your product timeline, inform your designer about your feature priorities so that they can incorporate future features into the layout. Just as developers don’t want to build a scalable product rather than rebuild a new CMS in 6 months, designers also care about a cohesive product that factors in all the elements necessary, such as text, embedded media, and other features.
When our non-designer team members make requests, we are constantly reminded about our assumptions. Sometimes, we get version one and realize we forgot to mention the colour scheme, or the type of audience that will be seeing the pull-up banner that we requested. Of course, they’ll probably be less than happy, so start with thanking them for their work before diving in with further requests!
We’d recommend looking at these pieces:
- Web Design in 4 Minutes (great UX and code samples)
- 7 Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI (Part 1)
- A visual overview of UI components to go over with a designer
Conclusion.
Oursky’s developers are passionate about code, and our designers are passionate about visuals. Both are just passionate about solving problems with great products. A great product includes a solid, scalable backend that can handle high concurrent load and a beautiful frontend that is intuitive for a user. A designer can only design well if they have an understanding of the users you want to serve and have an open dialogue to improve their design. Most designers want to have feedback — as long as the feedback you give them is relevant.