How to work with a designer

Rails
1

I am considering trying Rails out on a small web project where I will be
working with a designer. What is the typical workflow and relationship
for this:
1 have the designer learn rhtml
or
2 have the programmer take html mock ups and turn them into rhtml

In the past I have used Django (also very nice), which has a fairly
accessible (ala php) templating language.

Thanks,
David S.

2

On 3/14/06, David S. [email protected] wrote:

I am considering trying Rails out on a small web project where I will be
working with a designer. What is the typical workflow and relationship
for this:
1 have the designer learn rhtml
or
2 have the programmer take html mock ups and turn them into rhtml

My preference has always been to have the designer produce very clean,
static, HTML. Then I’ll break that up into the various pieces that I
need.

I guess it depends on how technical the designer is.

– James

3

David S. wrote:

1 have the designer learn rhtml
or
2 have the programmer take html mock ups and turn them into rhtml

Here’s my preference – start with a graphic designer who understands
the mechanics of HTML page layout, and have them produce flat comps (ie,
PSD files). Then the developer can take those and implement them as
HTML/working pages.

I think this approach allows the designer to focus on design, rather
than worrying about technical details in the HTML – presumably that’s
not their core competency anyway. It also saves the developer from
having to rewrite poor HTML.

The prerequisite is making sure the designer and developer have a good,
close working relationship; breakdowns in the process usually come from
poor communication over design goals and technical limitations.

4

David S. <davidschein@…> writes:

Thanks,
David S.

My recommendation would be to create temporary object per page that
includes all
fields needed for that page, this object is then passed to the view.
Then the
designer can simply place
<%= pageObject.field1 %> …<%= pageObject.field2 %> etc in the middle
of the
HTML, rather than having to do any logic in view or reference multiple
objects.
These fields should contain all calculated values etc.
Ville

5

You might want to consider hiring a designer that is a css expert. With
CSS, you can build highly designed sites and it can be designed after
the structure is already formed.

The developer would just have to output well structured html.

You might want to look at:

Ville Maanpaa wrote:

David S. <davidschein@…> writes:

Thanks,
David S.

My recommendation would be to create temporary object per page that
includes all
fields needed for that page, this object is then passed to the view.
Then the
designer can simply place
<%= pageObject.field1 %> …<%= pageObject.field2 %> etc in the middle
of the
HTML, rather than having to do any logic in view or reference multiple
objects.
These fields should contain all calculated values etc.
Ville

6

On Mar 14, 2006, at 10:39 AM, Chris B. wrote:

You might want to consider hiring a designer that is a css expert.
With
CSS, you can build highly designed sites and it can be designed after
the structure is already formed.

The developer would just have to output well structured html.

You might want to look at:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590593812/102-7785155-3448109

+1

The markup should be strictly independent of the design!

All the designer should need to do to the .rhtml files would be to
tweak class attributes and other minor changes for the purposes of
identifying particular divs and spans.

–
– Tom M.

7

On 3/14/06, James L. [email protected] wrote:

My preference has always been to have the designer produce very clean,
static, HTML. Then I’ll break that up into the various pieces that I
need.

I guess it depends on how technical the designer is.

This is what I like to do. There’s no real need to have designers
work directly in the app, if you’re just hiring them to design a
couple pages. Also, if they work on a running app then you’ll need to
help them get Rails up and running on their machine, maybe teach them
to use SVN, etc. Much easier to say, “Hey I need X pages” and let
them go.

On 3/14/06, shinji kuwayama [email protected] wrote:

The prerequisite is making sure the designer and developer have a good,
close working relationship; breakdowns in the process usually come from
poor communication over design goals and technical limitations.

This is the approach that I’ll be taking next time. The last project
I worked on, I asked the designer up front if he could build the pages
using CSS layouts, no tables. He said that wouldn’t be a problem.
When he finished the design though, it had tables nested seven or
eight layers deep! I would have been really pissed, but I loved the
design, so I decided to just recode it myself. I don’t know HTML/CSS
at all, so it took me about 8 hours to figure out how to do the
layouts with CSS. I wasn’t pleased that I spent that time coding
HTML, but I did learn a bit more about how to approach a project
(either just get mockups as Shinji suggested, or make sure that the
designer can actually write really clean HTML), and also have
confidence that I can convert a design into clean HTML/CSS if
necessary.

Pat

8

All, thanks much for the help.

Peace,
David S.