Dear Dev, a love letter

It's been a while. More precisely, a couple of minutes, because I was just asking you how to deal with the new Unity update, or why do the images look compressed, or if you could, pretty please, help me out with this thing I've been working on and now it's looking super weird and...

Sorry…

We designers sometimes don't understand the magic you work with your code. But we appreciate everything you do for us. You see, I love you, Dev. You make my pretty things work! You take my user flows and make the users actually flow through them. And you fix the bugs I sometimes create because I just wanted to change the colour of a button.

And Dev, this is why I'm writing you this letter. Because I can be a real pain in your ass sometimes. Believe me, I am aware of the awesome, symbiotic nature of our relationship — which I know, sometimes is not super beneficial for the both of us. But we are a team and we create amazing things together! There's so much potential between us, and I don't know if you know about this, Dev, but we can be the best of friends. It'll take some adjusting, sure, but I promise: we will be besties in no time.

I'll be more considerate of your time; I'll respect you when you're in the zone; I'll try not to introduce any bugs when making things look great; I'll keep the number of draw calls in mind so I don't mess your performance; and I might even make you tea when you're fixing my bugs!

But you need to accept me and my quirks, my naming conventions, my structured prefabs, and my passion for pixels. I hope you do, Dev, because we can make kick-ass UI together!

All the love in the world,

A UI Designer

This letter is dedicated to all the Engineers in the game development industry, but especially you, Client Developers, who make us UI Designers super happy (and sometimes really angry, but mostly happy) every day!