![]() ![]() You may even find opportunities to share the load. This will give developers a chance to make recommendations on how these can be optimized for their own needs. It can also be useful at this stage to explain how you work and the sort of deliverables you expect to produce. For example, ensuring members of the development team attend initial kick-off meetings and design workshops will not only ensure technical concerns are raised, but mean that those implementing our designs better understand the problems we’re trying to solve. The way we work needs to be more open and inclusive. ![]() Simply adjusting our attitude can effect change, and bring design and development teams closer together. ![]() So how can we improve this relationship? Ultimately, we’ll need to adapt, but even within existing workflows we can start to overlap. Yet, historically, it seems a wedge has been driven between us – perhaps a result of segregation and waterfall-style processes – resulting in animosity. Regardless of the exact process, it’s clear that the relationship between our two disciplines is more crucial than ever. Mock-ups were quickly converted into HTML prototypes, meaning further decisions could be based on usage rather than guesswork (and endless hours spent in Photoshop). Whilst their process still involved the creation of desktop-centric mock-ups, these were presented to the entire team early on, where questions about how pages might adapt and behave at different sizes were asked. The responsive projects I’ve worked on have had a lot of success combining design and development into one hybrid phase, bringing the two teams into one highly collaborative group. Ethan Marcotte, who worked with the team behind the responsive redesign of the Boston Globe website, talked about such an approach in his book: With such adaptability, a collaborative and iterative process is required. Largely concerned with layout, its underlying philosophy could ignite a trend towards interfaces that adapt to any number of different variables: input methods, bandwidth availability, user preference – you name it! Responsive web design is just the thin end of the wedge. Now, as we face an onslaught of different devices, the true universality of the web can no longer be ignored. Even the advent of web standards has had little impact. ![]() Somehow, this broken methodology has survived for the last fifteen years or so. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Drew’s checklist of things to consider before handing over a design. The handover of pristine, pixel-perfect creations to developers isn’t dissimilar to farting before exiting a crowded lift, leaving front-end developers scratching their heads as they fill in the inevitable gaps. The applications we use encourage rigid layouts, whilst linear processes focus on clients signing off paintings of websites that have little regard for behaviour and interactions. Until this point, we gave little thought to the environment in which users will experience our work, caring more about the aggregate than the individual. In responsive web design we’ve found a technique that allows us to design for the web as a medium in its own right: one that presents a fluid, adaptable and ever changing canvas. ![]()
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