Designer’s Pet Peeves

Posted on June 23rd, 2009 by jason

Webdesigner Depot just published my first article written for them, all about the ongoing struggle between designers and developers for the heart of the Web. In the article, entitled “5 Pet Peeves Designers Have With Developers (and How to Avoid Them)“, I wanted to air some of the gripes I constantly hear from those who visualize the Web against those who build the Web and suggest some ideas for how to resolve them.

A little taste from the article:

Peeve #2: “The colors are all wrong!”

You don’t choose colors arbitrarily, but developers seem to think that “close is close enough.”

Issue
I don’t know whether this is true of all developers, but I once worked with a developer who was red-green color-blind (he was a huge fan of our content manager, who sent all of her emails in pink text on a lime-green background). However, being color-blind didn’t stop him from being a kick-ass developer.

Solution
If you want the colors to be right, then spell out all of the color values on the page. Don’t rely on your developer to eyeball the color values or to sample the colors in Photoshop.

You also need to consider that the problem may not be with the developer but with you. Colors look different on a Mac and in CMYK (if you happen to accidentally enable that color space). Make sure that your document color mode and proofs are set to generic RGB by default.