those that work with adobe flash know that different people have varied strengths and skill sets in reference to the flash medium. i have found in working with developers and designers that each tend to focus too closely on their role in a project and do not take the time to understand the project objectives and/or full picture. when working with a more design oriented person, i find that the they tend not to look at technical elements as they relate to the project and solely focus on the visual and emotional impact of the work. the more developer oriented individual tends to solely focus on the technical implementation and can lose site of the importance of the emotional and visual impact of the project.
if i had a dime for every time a developer missed a detail pertaining to visuals of a site… well i might be blogging from my own personal island somewhere. for example… say… “pixel fonts”. back in the days before “advanced” text control introduced in flash 8, designers often used pixel fonts that would render very crisp characters. there were a couple rules, though… size had to be 8px and the textfield had to be “on pixel” which meant the x/y coordinates had to be a whole integer. well this is where some developers didn’t take the time to be sure the design is rendered as intended. this was especially prevalent when menus were generated dynamically and moved… and to match the design, all you really had to do was round the coordinate to the nearest whole integer. seems simple … but you have no idea how many times it was missed and in turn continued the rift between the two groups. the designers felt that this lack of attention to detail proved a lack of investment in their design, or just pure laziness. we have all experienced the rift between the groups – as both are sensitive to their talents and hard work. but the two groups really shouldn’t be so challenged to understand each other. making sure that both developer and designer are involved in the project from day one and regularly throughout will ensure project success and reaching the end goal with a little less drama and headache that come from these relationship issues. remember… your talent in solving complex programmatic challenges can translate into a great asset to solve visual interface design issues.. and can make the success of the project that much more rewarding.
For some ideas check out the “code head checklist†that I update with suggestions regularly.