https://medium.com/@onepixelout/8-ways-to-improve-the-handover-with-engineers-fd1d2232a80

This article originally appeared on onepixelout.com.

image from pexels

I wasn’t always a designer. I started out as a front-end developer.

Or “web designer” as we used to say in them days.

• lifts newspaper and gives it a shake*

Anyway, there were parts of the job that were definitely annoying. Those annoying things usually came from (amongst other people) designers. Designers would come along with last minute changes and impossible requests.

After a while, I got fed up withbeing annoyed. If you can’t beat them, join them. I became a designer, and I’m using my insight to hopefully make designers everywhere less annoying.

What Was Annoying?

As the developer, I would receive a Photoshop file containing all of the assets that were part of the approved design. At this point, the client had already signed off on this, so the expectation had been set. There was no more room for negotiation, I had to figure out how to make these designs pixel perfect on the screen for the client. Because these designs had been created by a graphic designer, they contained:

• lots of custom elements — custom fonts before Google fonts were a thing
• cloudy backgrounds at a time when transparency was not supported by browsers such as IE7
• rounded corners when that was a trend and was difficult to do. Now that it’s not a trend anymore, you don’t see as many rounded corners.

The handover between designers and engineers have always been tricky. It is a road fraught with pushback, technical restrictions and disappointment. As someone who has been on both sides of the fence, I feel I am in a unique position to make things better for designers and engineers by listing some of the techniques I’ve used in the past few years to better facilitate handovers with engineers.

Why Improve the Handover with Engineers

Developers are the last people to handle your designs before they reach the user. When the handover between engineers and designer goes smoothly, the experience is usually delightful. Often, these two forces can combine and sparks can fly. Engineers can offer insights into possible animations and transitions that maybe we as designers might not have thought of. Designers can be pointed to micro-interactions that will make the user experience extraordinary.

When these two worlds come together, the results can be beautiful.

We should not think of designers and developers being opposites — but we are all part of the same team. But forging a wonderful working relationship isn’t easy. No one is going to hand this to you, this is something that takes work and understanding from both sides.