Let's talk about the designer hand off or working with developers now, the traditional way that designers
would work with developers was in what we call a silo that is a designer would just work by themselves.
And then once they're done, they just hand off the designs to a developer.
And the developer just had to create these pixel perfect products based on those designs.
Now, this process isn't always the best, mainly because there's a lack of communication between developers
and designers.
Ideas can be really shared between one another.
Maybe a designer is the only one that talks to the client and the developer has no idea what the client
wants.
So it is more and more common to see designers work much more collaboratively with developers working
in teams, maybe with product managers, with developers, with scrum masters, so that everybody works
together to complete this cycle that we see here.
And because we always have this post launch phase where we have to iterate and learn and constantly
improve the product.
Now, for a developer, it's really, really hard to go from design to actually building the product,
using something like a programming language.
Now, at the same time, a designer might wonder why this developer can't do something that they have
designed or why this developer created something that is different or slightly different than what they
design.
So the key to a successful designer developer handoff is as a designer to always keep the developer
in mind.
So as a designer, it's actually good for you to speak with developers and design things based on what
can technically be done.
Design effectively for the platform that you're building in.
A developer should know enough about design theory to collaborate and have a mutual language that both
can speak together.
This idea of mutual understanding and respect is the key to collaboration because at the end of the
day, you're working together to solve a problem for a user.
So by you as a designer, learning what a developer has to do, you're going to be a lot better at communicating
with developers and vice versa, which is why we've included in the upcoming sections how e-mail works,
how you might be able to put a website online so that when you work closely with a developer, as you
said, you're able to understand what they do, how they work, but also gives you that flexibility
to potentially build your own products, be your own designer and developer.
Now, personally, I love this quote and not sure who said it.
I've modified it a little bit, but this is generally just good advice when working with anybody.
Always design as if the person who ends up maintaining your work will be a violent psychopath, who
knows where you live.
It's always important to think about who you're working with and who you're designing for so that everybody
ends up happy.
So let's learn a little bit about the web development world in the next couple of sections.