Visual design is a very tricky thing…
When done within a well-structured team where all the roles filled, visual design goes after UX, so all the usability things are kinda solved… yet visual design is too static and too subjective. Although the delivery by the visual designer might look okay, you might still encounter issues that would influence the efficiency of further product development.
[announce]
So what can go wrong with the visual design?
Have designer talk to the front end guy
Everything underneath boils down to a simple piece of advice: have your visual designer and front-end guy sit together and discuss how things need to be designed, provided for, and why.
I’ve witnessed great individuals who cooperated on creating a design the right way, and it has saved a great deal of time and efforts in further development.
Follow the grid
This is the main sin designer might still commit. Did your designer take input on which grid is to be used by the front end developers?
Layers
Make sure layers are separate, not rasterized, and having layer compositions is valuable too.
Styleguide
Style guides usually contain atomic elements, their combinations, and various states.
I personally pay special attention to a system of proportions in place. Colours have meanings. Margins and paddings do matter, and bigger padding has a very specific meaning, and seeing the system in the design would be good for a developer to design a web application consistently.
States
Make sure you’ve got these states covered:
- hover
- pushed
- processing
- empty mandatory field
- validation not passed
Notes
It’s my dream, and I haven’t seen it much… Wouldn’t it be great if designers left some notes/comments within their design explaining how it works 😉 I mean, we can see it, but can we really grasp why the certain visual decision was made?
Appropriate Software
Photoshop is not always the best option for web design. I’ve heard people use Illustrator for it, as well as Sketch which is becoming more and more popular.
Post Script
Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts on the topic on Facebook… And you can always contact us to get feedback about your design.
