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closer to your customers.

Where do you fit in?

There has been a long running debate here at closerlook on where slicing imagery, XHTML, and CSS work fits in the workflow. Is it a design task since it involves layout and color, and ultimately the technology places constraints on the design? Is it a technical task since it involves coding? Which brings up another topic for debate: can XHTML be called “coding”? Can it be called programming? Is there any difference? I consider coding as the syntax or markup and programming is the logic. People tend to use the words interchangeably and I think it obscures the definition of who does what work and when. Anyway, I digress. The issue that we run into is that our developers are busy enough writing C#, ActionScript, JavaScript, and SQL that it becomes a distraction to have to go back and forth working out the front-end display issues. This is a two-way street. The back and forth disrupts the designers as much as the developers. It used to be it’s own competency here at closerlook and was labeled production. I felt like production became a middleman in the process and have pushed to have production fall on the designer. I feel like the ability of the designer to have a solid understanding of the medium’s constraints helps streamline the process of creating a website. If you design it, you should be able to build it. You end up avoiding the conversation between designers and developers where an explanation of why some element of a design won’t work takes place. My theory is that designers are responsible for how it looks, and developers are responsible for how it works. I realize it’s not always that black and white and I appreciate the varied insights that come from both developers and designers. Here at closerlook, we have folks on both the design team and developer team capable of doing the work. There is a good article over at CFDJ where some other companies weigh in on how they handle this tricky division of labor. If you have an opinion, let us know.