How to Web Design
I was recently asked by someone in an agency that uses remote developers and designers to put together a presentation to help educate about required design deliverables for front-end developers. Their problem is that the designers in a city on one side of the world create full-page photoshop comps that they show their clients for approval before sending the comps, sometimes one at a time, to developers in a city on the other side of the world. Fonts are specified in pt and everything in the comps are labelled with precise pixel measurements. This is unsurprisingly causing a lot of project management problems as developers struggle with PSDs without having an overview of the design system, and designers are frustrated that the resulting websites have discrepancies when overlaid with the comp images. Meanwhile project managers have to juggle with the added difficulty of timezones and huge Photoshop files, and client managers must always try and deal with project owners expecting the end products to look exactly like the comps. I’ve found this kind of practice shockingly common even today, especially here in Asia.
Rather than tailor a presentation specifically for them, I decided to forgo my fee and expand the scope to try and make it more useful for other web teams who might be struggling with similar problems.
So today I launched https://howtoweb.design, a presentation about general web design best practices and considerations, also covering deliverables for project owners, users, developers, and search engines. It’s aimed not only at remote design teams but also new designers, or those who want a quick refresher to get updated on modern best practices. I’m hoping it might also be useful for people covering other roles in web teams who want to better understand the web design process and requirements.
Obviously it’s a presentation so I’ve tried to keep it succinct, using bullets and short sentences, while still trying to get the message across so that anyone in any team might be able to understand and present it.
The points I’d really like feedback on are:
* From your perspective and experience, is it clear easy to understand? Do any slides need expanding on or added links for further reading?
* Do you think it’s useful?
* Is it overly opinionated?
* Is any content irrelevant/redundant/missing?
* How can I make it more engaging? If you have any suggestions for overall style, or for images, links, and wording on a specific slide that would be great
* If you spot any mistakes: content, spelling, grammar, punctuation?
* Ideas or suggestions regarding the design? I haven’t spent much time on this so perhaps a presentation about web design might be designed better…
Of course I would also really appreciate help sharing it via Twitter, Facebook, Wechat, Hacker News, Newsletters etc. if it’s something you feel you can endorse.
Thanks a lot!
