# RE: Re: how to work with a designer

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-how-to-work-with-a-designer/54843>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 14, 2006, 7:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-how-to-work-with-a-designer/54843 "2006-03-14T19:55:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![emanon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ecae2f/32.png) [@emanon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/emanon)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2006, 7:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-how-to-work-with-a-designer/54843/1 "2006-03-14T19:55:43Z")

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> 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.

As a designer, I whole-heartedly agree that all presentation should be  
in the CSS file(s). However, access to and the ability to _structure_  
the templates is just as important, in my opinion. For one thing, the  
more “advanced” table-less layouts – rounded corners, for example –  
require some

-juggling or 
-itis, depending on your  
point-of-view, so having the ability to set-up the page structure like  
this is very helpful.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![emanon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ecae2f/32.png) [@emanon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/emanon)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2006, 7:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-how-to-work-with-a-designer/54843/2 "2006-03-14T19:58:44Z")

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+1 on comments by Chris and Dean.

CSS should be used _heavily_ for the layout of the site… and yes, it  
get’s  
a wee bit tricky when you need to introduce rounded corners and other  
fancy  
workings.

It’s funny that I just read this thread… because our designer finally  
sent  
me the HTML to integrate with, and it’s a bunch of static pages  
generated by  
ImageReady. Literally everything is an image, and hundreds of spacers  
are  
used everywhere.

Help me… please… help me 🙂

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![emanon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ecae2f/32.png) [@emanon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/emanon)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2006, 8:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-how-to-work-with-a-designer/54843/3 "2006-03-14T20:57:49Z")

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My advice is to start from scratch with rails tags.  
Otherwise you will go insane.  
I had the exact same situation.  
You go mental on the div naming id’s alone.  
I started from scratch with my own CSS and div naming scheme.  
A lot of work but otherwise it will be a maintenance nightmare

You will need a desiner that is prepared to code the rails way.  
And if he does he will find out for himself that its cool to do it like  
that.

Good luck

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![emanon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ecae2f/32.png) [@emanon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/emanon)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2006, 9:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-re-how-to-work-with-a-designer/54843/4 "2006-03-14T21:03:32Z")

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I’m the developer in a two man dev team of which it’s me (experience  
rails  
programmer) and one other person (experience designer but still new to  
rails). We started with him creating mockups and then I went in and  
wired  
it up as an rhtml template for use in the application. As time has gone  
on,  
he’s seen what I’ve done and made changes to the view code himself based  
on  
what’s already there. It works great. He’s learning rhtml as he need  
to  
get things done.

The rhtml templates are intuitive enough that most any designer can pick  
it  
up with a little time.