The need for an in-house graphic designer who can interact with the front-end developer

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

When should you outsource work? When should you bring it in-house? I work at a place that had an in-house designer for several years, but got rid of them in August and has since tried to rely on outside firms. This has problems.

We hired an outside design firm and they were sloppy in the manner they got us the designs and assets. I wrote an email to our internal team, including our management:

I think next time we hire an outside design firm, we should specify in the contract what format they need to deliver the work in. In particular, layered PSDs would be useful. Leaving it to the design firm to decide what format they want to give us leaves them with too much leeway to dump some of the work on us.

A co-worker (our new in-house front end developer) just wrote this and sent it as an email to the whole team. I think this is very smart advice:

Yep, I also think that part of the issue is that we went from flat designs, which are basically jpeg snapshots, to HTML build without prototyping any of the moving parts or GUI features, so that’s what we are in effect doing now. But now we are in a much stricter environment (with dependencies) so finding code solutions takes a bit longer.

This was definitely due to timeline considerations because programmers need the code to work on and I can’t hold things up by finding the ideal way to show a pretty button when the programmer just wants a button to show up so they can reference it. But one thing that would make this process more productive (but not necessarily faster) would be to have an in house graphic designer who can interact with the front-end developer to agree on what’s possible during the GUI design process. And I don’t mean that so much in a limiting way where the coder is pushing back on the designer’s vision, but more in a way where the designer and coder have even a kind of friendly competitive spirit going on where designer asks coder – hey, is this possible, does this exist? And coder can say no, but may also say, well I dunno but it would be cool, so let me see. Likewise, once the designer learns about what is possible, it can open up their eyes to new solutions and innovative design. And by design, I don’t mean colors and fonts, but UX/GUI/IA whatever you want to call it these days.

But in a way this would require more of an R&D attitude to tech rather than the utilitarian one right now. There would need to be playtime as well as mission critical work.

I also think there has been a very loose definition of “assets” so far. I mean, a screenshot is not an asset, it’s a guide. The assets would normally be created by a graphic designer according to agreed standards for file structure, naming conventions, color palettes, all of which I am making up as I go along, you will be pleased to hear!