Readers Respond: What do you hate about Web Designers

Web designers are the artists on a website team. They focus on the details of the look and feel and often forget about other aspects of the site in their quest to make it look perfect. But in this quest, they can be very annoying for their co-workers to work with. Find out what annoys other people about Web designers and share your pet peeves about them here.

Feel free to post here even if you are a Web designer yourself. But if you want to share annoyances about the people who program your website or build the HTML, please use the What do you hate about Web Developers page instead.

Web Designers Forget The 1st Objective

I designed my first web page when HTML was just an experiment. The first objective was to display well formatted text on any monitor. Here on my smart phone, I can see that designers have lost their way. They are so focused on "perfect" print formatting, that I'm continually zooming in and out - scrolling left and right - reorienting myself with the web page. I found this article as I hunt for an iphone browser that will ignore the uber strict formatting on many web pages.

—Guest Guest Tony

Print is not so different

I saw a demonstration on web building with Quark 8 and I was dumbfounded. FINALLY a big step in the direction of WYSIWYG web construction. I've read so many articles about how the transition from print design to web design is leaving many print folks behind. I'm one of them. But the issue for me has always been about the coding or programming. I've been waiting for someone to develop software that is drag-and-drop, just like laying out a print document. I know the linear configuration of a printed document isn't the same as the much more complicated organization of a web document but that was never the problem. It was always, for me, about all that ugly code that dictates the visual. If you think about it, code also exists in a layout program like Quark or InDesign -- but you never see it or have to go behind the scenes to "tweak" anything. I know there's a long way to go but I say KEEP GOING and SPEED IT UP! Designing directly in a program would change everything.

—Guest Klaus Kinski

Decorators

My biggest peeve might be developers, clients, managers and even other designers who think that design is about making things aesthetically pleasing. In my book, design is about solving problems in communication. Be it planning content, search engine optimization, instilling a sense of personality, or making sure pages work equally well on screen readers and browsers, good design serves the audience, not the creator's ego. Typography, color palettes, grid systems, Photoshop filters -- these are the tools we use to convey content, as well as the site's attitude about its content. Serious designers don't push buttons; they ask questions. Design is less about being clean, and more about being clear.

—Guest Ben

Designers with print skillset

Designers with a strong "print" background are not a good fit for web design. (Unless they learn the difference between a page and a scroll. Imagine a roll of toilet paper.) Print designers think in terms of pages physically printed on a fixed sized paper. They tend to make demands that require a page break at certain areas of a page. This is not so hard as long as the page breaks before you run out of paper, but if the page break is placed too far down, then you are in trouble. Not to mention that in the United States, we normally use "Letter" sized paper but the rest of the world uses "A4". Print medium has its place in the world, but it's a very conflicting skillset for web design. As a developer, when I run up against impossible "print" specifications, I tell the designer to post a PDF version in addition to the web version. Now lets hope that both of print and web versions contain the same content; but versioning control is a whole 'nother topic!

—Guest mike

Zooming

It's not the same zooming a page (from the browser) than zooming a screenshot (from some graphical program); and I definitely hate when some designers fail to see that difference. Some designers will often zoom into a screenshot, complain about a stray pixel, and never care about how the page looks on the browser, even less when zoomed. While I try to respect the designer's artistic view for the site, the fact is that "the site being viewable by 10% more users" is more important to me than "that pixel being ugly on a magnified screenshot". First, because the average user will probably never notice that pixel, and second because fixing a pixel-level issue often involves bloating the mark-up, at the expense of accessibility. Most times I have been given a complaint from a designer in the form of a magnified screenshot, a in-browser zoom has been enough to justify the minor missmatch.

—Guest herenvardo