Designers, be kind to your developers
By: Linda Wilson
Tags: Developer, UI, Design, Zeplin, Sketch

If you call yourself any kind of application designer — do not provide developers with PDFs of your designs.

What the hell, I can’t even believe this is still a thing.

Recently, a developer I work with often asked me to provide her with a quote for an interface design.

Most of the time, I win these projects. The developer and I work well together. We negotiate budgets and know each others processes and we enjoy working with each other.

I didn’t get this project because the client decided to use their own designer. That’s ok, it happens. When the developer told me I didn’t get the project she added, “I met him and he talked about sending me a pdf. I shed a little tear in my heart at the thought of Zeplin.”

This got me thinking about a designers process and workflow. It’s important to be a competent designer but to also have a professional workflow. A workflow that saves the client money and the developer time.

There are a 1000 different devices now with increasingly complex interactions. Providing a developer with a PDF is cruel and should be a crime.

The easier you can make a developer’s life, the more they will recommend you for projects. You create more avenues for work without having to really do anything.

If a developer is pitching to a new client, who are they going to recommend as the designer?

The designer who sends them a PDF of the design or the designer whose entire workflow is geared towards making their life easy?

Developers jobs are hard and their time is valuable (yes, yes, yours is too but I’m not talking about you). They solve difficult problems for a living. It’s a waste of their time when they have to chase designers for assets, colour codes, margin sizes etc. All that stuff they don’t want to and shouldn’t have to deal with.

It’s not just about them though. No designer wants an angry developer on their hands, that sucks so bad. The more organised I am, the happier the developer and the faster I get paid. Then, I can move onto new projects without old ones coming back to haunt me.

It is the designers job to provide all the elements of a design to a developer in the easiest way possible.

Every aspect of my workflow is designed to save time. Whether it be my time, the clients time or the developers time.

My workflow consists of the usual sketching and wire framing and then I jump into Sketch. Artboards are then loaded into Invision. From there, both the client and developer can view any interactions in the design.

Once the design is approved I ensure my Sketch files are super organised. Assets are named properly, assets ready for export, style guide is consistent and ready to go. I don’t want the developer hassling me if I can help it.

Finally, I also export all the finished artboards to Zeplin. It’s here that the developers can access everything they need. Hex codes, margin sizes, paddings, images (as png or SVG) are all there.

I am a freelancer and I learned all this the hard way.

I have worked with developers who were constantly coming back to me and asking for things. Getting frustrated when they couldn’t find “shadow-man.png” in the assets folder. Oh yeah, and why are there 3 versions of that pink colour and why are there 6 font variants when you’re only using 2? Eh?!

You want to hear crickets, not complaints when you hand over those final files.

Spending the time needed to organise your files means you can relax and I really like to relax.

If you are a designer who thinks it’s fine to give developers PDFs, I would love to know why. Do tell.