I have been hired to do functional development for several web site redesigns. T

Question

I have been hired to do functional development for several web site redesigns. The company I work for has a relatively low technical level, and the previous development of the web sites were completed by a graphic designer who is self taught as far as web development is concerned.

My responsibilities have extended beyond basic development, as I have been also tasked with creating the development environment, and migrating hosting from external CMS hosting to internal servers incorporating scripting languages (I opted for PHP/MySQL).

I am working with the graphic designer, and he is responsible for the creative design of the web. We are running into a bit of friction over confusion between the boundaries of our respective tasks.

For example, we had some differences of opinion on navigation. I was primarily concerned with ease-of-use (the majority of our userbase are not particularly web-savvy), as well as meeting W3 WAI standards (many of our users are older, and we have a higher than average proportion of users with visual impairment). His sole concern was what looked best for the website, and I felt that the direction he was pushing for caused some functional problems.

I feel color choices, images, fonts, etc. are clearly his responsibility, and my expectation was that he would simply provide me with the CSS pages and style classes and IDs to use, but some elements of page layout also seem to fall more under the realm of "usability", which to me translates as near-synonymous with "functionality".

I've been tasked with selecting the tools we'll use, which include frameworks, scripting languages, database design, and some open source applications (Moodle for example, and quite probably Drupal in the future). While these tools are quite customizable, working directly with some of the interfaces is beyond his familiarity with CSS, HTML, and PHP. This limits how much direct control he has over the appearance, which has lead to some discussion about the tool choices.

Is there a generally accepted dividing line between the roles of a web designer and a web developer? Does his relatively inexperienced background in web technologies influence that dividing line?

Explanation / Answer

No dividing line

I have found that this is quite common and there is never a clear cut dividing line between graphic designer and web designer. What skills the graphic designer brings to the table with be completely dependent on their experience with web technology (generally this doesn't include any css or html).

Working with a graphic designer requires communication and compromise

The way that I have worked with graphic designers in the past varies with the skills of the graphic designer. In general this will equate specifically to how well the graphic designer can create a design which is suitable for a website.

Dynamic layouts

The first thing that I do when I receive a wireframe or a first draft of a design for a website I check to see how suitable the design is to adapting to a dynamic layout.

How will the site look if it doesn't actually have that much text in a particular portion?
How does the header text look if it needs to wrap around? (Ad nauseum, Ad infinitum)
Depending on what I find in the above I may voice my concerns about the design with the graphic designer and ask for further information for things such as rollover effects (should these buttons change colors?), what happens with this background gradient if we put more text inside this menu item (this will break the design).

So pretty much anything that I can see that happens on a dynamic website that could break the design I voice with the designer and get that addressed in the design. Depending on the skill of the graphic designer to take the above into account I may not actually need to do any of that.

In your case

In your case the graphic designer is ignoring key parts of the functionality of your requirements, and so you are perfectly correct in requesting design changes.

Bringing it together from the design to the website

The graphic designer shouldn't need to know any html or css to be able to create a dynamic website. All we need from them is the images, and vision of how the site should look. Trust me this is quite difficult to get right, and take customer usability into account. The rest is up to the developers.

I personally have both Photoshop and Fireworks on my work PC, and I perform both image cutting and capturing to create the most optimal css possible using the smallest number of images in sprite sheets.

This is not something that most graphic designers will be familiar with and so image compression, optimising css sprites should be purely a programming task.

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