[valtron]

When I used to work with my designer friend, he would tell me to do things like that: increase this padding by 5px, lighten the color by a little, slightly decrease the border-radius, etc. One by one like that, I find it hard to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself.

Anyway, slightly OT: the screenshot looks like a Google page. Does anyone know which one? I really want to know what difference the 3px makes!

[DanBC]

Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc?

Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.

[valtron]

No, but I just checked a few of the sites we made and none break from ctrl+ (regarding this: I've never seen a non-tech person, i.e. 99% of traffic for the sites, use shortcuts in the first place); they also look consistent between _modern_ browsers; and how often do people load their own fonts? Is the designer responsible that a site becomes unusable under Wingdings? (Sorry for the strawman.)

That being said, when a designer says things like "move this button 3px to the left" they usually mean things like "move this button so its right edge aligns with the right edge of the content below, which got shifted because we added padding-right." So the original request gets implemented as what he _wants_ rather than what he asked for.

[Chris_Newton]

Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc?

Why would either of those things be a problem? Attention to detail is attention to detail at any scale.

It’s true that at scales smaller than anyone would normally notice there can be a difference between a clean optical alignment and a “perfect” mathematical one. This is a challenge that folks like font designers and artists working on icons often have to face. If you zoom in dramatically (say 5x or 10x, not 120%), these details would probably look slightly off.

However, at the kind of scale we’re using for examples here, zooming in will only exaggerate careless flaws like having things misaligned by a pixel or using the same border-radius for nested elements where concentricity of the rounded corners was intended. A well designed page will continue to look clean and tidy at larger scales, and it won’t mysteriously break just because someone zoomed or had different font preferences.

[gagaga]

>Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.

What does this mean?

[fibbery]

I don't understand how "some designers don't handle edge cases" translates into "we shouldn't have designers".

[timothya]

I couldn't find a page that looks exactly like the screenshot, but the Google Scholar page is pretty similar: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=search

Then again, this article is from Google Ventures, so maybe they are just using internal design resources.