A Guide to Visual Design for Engineers

A UX Designer’s takeaways from working with several Engineering teams and realizing the gaps

Many times as a UX Designer I get asked the question of whether or not we need to know how to code to succeed. My answer is always the same, no, you don’t need to know the ins and outs of the language, just understand enough to have a conversation with the Engineers on your team. What is important is knowing the limitations of your designs and the resources that will be required to build them.

However, I find that this road is often not a two-way street like I believe it should be. Many times when working with Engineers, I have noticed that a lot are afraid to experiment with a design, and I believe it is due to the limited number of resources to teach them these skill sets. So I’m here to change this. It is my turn to break down the areas of Visual Design that I think all Engineers should understand at a high level, just like we UX Designers need to understand code at a high level.

1. Designers create their screens in a spacing system

Each team will vary in terms of their system of choice, but more often than not a Design team will use a scale for the spacing of all their elements on a screen. For reference, the most common ones are a 4pt and 8pt scale.