Drew McLellan has for the 4th year running wrangled a bunch of great authors and launched the Web Development Advent Calendar 24ways.
It isn’t December yet [in this time zone anyways] but the first day’s article has been posted for your enjoyment — Easing The Path from Design to Development. This is a nice piece on interaction between different sides of the site building process, something I’m intimately familiar with. A few pointers from my experience that are worth adding to Drew’s comments…
On layout and page size
I think its quite helpful for designers to work in a much larger canvas size [both height and width] then some agreed upon base size. This forces the designer to look the size issues dead on.
On “content volume”
Depending on the type of site its important to also consider more then just text content, headers or username length. The impact of embedded content or 3rd party content — be it youtube videos, images from flickr, ad banner sizes — may drive the extreme or minimum sizes for columns and your general grid design.
On the “dance”
Every working situation is different, with some freelance situations the coder might come in after the designer has totally wrapped, but even in cases where the walls between disciplines are high I think that the best way to smooth out the handoff is to have walked through the designs before they’re approved and ready to hand off and discuss together some of the issues like form button design or page flexibility.
That out of the way, I do think Drew’s article is worth a read through for designers, developers and project managers alike. And I’m sure over the next 24 days 24ways will again prove to be essential reading for anyone who builds websites. Previous coverage on this site.
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