Designers don't know kuak about the web

OMG, that new #devrant section will help me release some steam. I am full stack dev, but I work mainly on the front recently. I have to deal with files (illustrator) from designers who have no idea what they are doing. Let me take you on my journey to "scratching my head while watching at my screen".

Let's start with the basics, color:

Well, I never received a design with the color palette included. I do care, because each page is designed in a separate file, and I eyedrop the colors to make the CSS. I often discover that 2 blue buttons on 2 pages have, in fact, 2 different blues. It's not humanly noticeable, but it shows they don't use a color palette for their own work. It's like if I wrote my programs without the help of constants...

Next, spacing:

Every page has a different spacing between the different blocks (or sections) that compose the content. Even the space before the footer is random! Of course I don't comply, and make what seems to me a good average. They don't care because I fix all the spacings for all the pages and nobody told me to "comply" to the design...ever...

This applies for content width as well. I worked last week on a site where 2 pages had 3 or 4 different content widths. And one page even had 2 different widths for multiple sections...

We can continue with fonts:

I receive designs where there is no "default" font. Yes, I check all pages, and I can't find an area of the design that makes me think: "that is the default font". Like on different pages, even if the font has the same size, the letter-spacing and line-height are different! Same page I was working on last week, different paragraphs had different spacings, it looked so weird!

Lastly, they don't know about mobiles.

Seriously, half of the designs I receive have pictures with "rollover" effects to show a legend, or sometimes popup menus. I am always thinking: "how do we show the users on tablet such content?". And of course, I have to figure it out, because instructions are still to be found.

The worst about mobile designs, is that they make the font bigger at 750px. Yes, ok, but why only ONE section of the page? And, mobiles have down to 320px width of screen estate, do I keep that font at 42px? I make the font proportional to the view width in those cases (thanks vw unit!), but I never had corresponding instructions ever....

Good job if you read down to here, you deserve a cookie 🍪.