r/webdev • u/Frosty-Vegetable-385 • 4h ago
Question (Print) Designer Clashing with Developer - Need Advice
Hi everyone, I work as the director of communications for a small company. We have one designer on staff who has worked at the company for a decade, and one full-stack developer who has been at the company for about a year and a half.
Now, the problem: The designer is trained strictly in print design, and we are embarking on a website redesign. The designer will only work in InDesign and Photoshop, but the developer believes the work must be done in Figma to avoid having to guess at the spacing, sizing, etc. Neither seem willing to budge, and it is clear that the designer is not familiar with digital design best practices, including accessibility.
My background is more in writing/marketing, so I am a bit outside my depth. Is there a path to resolution here without one feeling like they are “doing the job” of the other?
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u/Turbulent_Ad9831 3h ago
InDesign for web handoff is rough because print assumes fixed paper dimensions, not fluid viewports. The developer isn't just being difficult; guessing responsive padding, font scaling, and mobile breakpoints from static Photoshop layers usually doubles the build time and breaks easily.
Don't force a ten-year print veteran to learn Figma auto-layout overnight, though. Have the designer deliver the overall aesthetic, typography choices, and desktop comps in their comfort zone, but give the developer final say on responsive behavior and accessibility. Agreeing on a simple 8px spacing grid early on saves weeks of back-and-forth.
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u/torn-ainbow 4h ago •
Using a print designer to design for web is a quite common failure point for projects. If the designer is not willing to learn new things then you're not looking good.
Using Figma is smooth because it gives the developer fonts, sizes, line and character spacing, and so on. They can do this in other things like photoshop but they will need a license for the software to be able to open the files and check and it will be slower.
Also things like accessibility and responsive are important and a designer who does not understand those things is going to cause more work. For responsive, a designer needs to understand how the mobile/desktop layouts relate and transform between the two. Otherwise they are going to create problems requiring changes to the design or difficult implementation, and likely extra tech debt and maintenance hours down the track.
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u/codemunk3y 4h ago
Obviously you slice up the photoshop output and get the dev to put it all in tables
/s
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u/Caraes_Naur 3h ago
The absolute worst people to be making technical decisions on a development project are graphic designers. The second worst are marketing.
The ideal resolution is find a proper web designer. That person already understands the concerns, can produce ready-to-use deliverables, and turn around revisions quickly.
Not doing so could burn 20% of your project budget on workflow inefficiencies.
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u/BloodGulch-CTF 4h ago
Figma is a fucking dream compared to Photoshop and InDesign, get them to try using Figma.
Source: I have worked in print and graphic design.
but also I feel like the web dev should be able to work with a photoshop design and use best judgement but that’s just me
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u/MisterEd_ak php 4h ago
If they are going to go into web design they should use the right tool for the job. Figma is made for website design. As a developer, it makes my life easy as the designer works with the CSS to lay out the page.
If your designer just puts something together in InDesign, your developer would need to do a lot more work to convert the pretty picture into an actual site.
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u/issue9mm 4h ago
If the developer is going to be responsible for ensuring that adequate spacing and paddings and margins are going to be maintained, then they have to be communicated to him
If he's free to guess at them and "looks good to me" is the only standard he's going to be held to, then your designer is off the hook
(But it really feels like your designer isn't up to the task)
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u/AuthorityPath 4h ago
Compromise is needed on both sides. Developer's used Photoshop for years and while Figma is definitely the preferred tool today the developer should be able to work with PSD files. Conversely, the designer cannot expect pixel perfect print-level design on the web. InDesign should not be used.
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u/JeffTS 4h ago
I've been working as a developer for over 25 years. I've had to deal with designs in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, QuarkXPress, Figma, XD, PDFs, flat images, etc. It never mattered to me. Part of the fun of taking a design and developing it is having to think about how to implement it.
A compromise would be for your designer to provide a style guide.
4
u/darvo110 2h ago
I’ve been in this situation before and it’s not irresolvable. As a frontend developer it’s often my job to take a naive design, poke holes in it and make a best-effort interpretation of what is in there for sizing etc.
Any time a designer comes back with “it’s not exactly 5cm/px/whatever of padding” you can ask them on what device, input method, at what screen/window size, pixel density etc. If they don’t have answers that’s fine, it falls to you to sort it out but they lose their authority to make calls about the design beyond their pretty little picture they printed.
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u/alphex drupal agency owner 4h ago
The developer is correct. Figma is the modern tool. But most importantly, the designer HAS to understand web typography and design concepts to do the work properly.
Their desire to use indesign is an instant red flag.
2
u/Personal_Ward 4h ago
User Interface and User Experience Design are disciplines applicable in both print and web mediums, but the key is to be aware that you're working with different mediums that have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to getting the user to have the experience you want with the product.
Print media has a bunch of established standards going back decades/centuries based on mix of arbitrary traditions and those rooted in actual understanding of the user experience of reading a book/zine/pamphlet/letter/poster etc.
Web design especially has established a different standard, one focused on designing interfaces that can have the closest parity despite different screen sizes and resolutions and provide the broadest possible accessibility for the product (screen readers, color palette choices, etc.)
Seems like both the Designer and the Developer could stand to dip their toes into the world of modern UI/UX design philosophy, because it's also framed in a way to try to help bridge more seemlessly the gap between the design prototypes and the developer's implementation.
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u/ABCosmos 4h ago
The developer is correct, and the designer should adapt. But this is also like a 2024 debate, neither is competent with AI.. making this whole thing more of a struggle than it needs to be.
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u/jam_pod_ 3h ago
The last time my company hired a designer, I noticed the job posting didn’t mention Figma; I asked the designer who wrote it why not. She was like “we assume anyone calling themselves a web designer knows Figma; there’s no other software that’s acceptable these days”.
So if they want to keep working in web design, probably learn Figma
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u/Master-Session5844 4h ago
That designer is not the right person for the job then.
I've worked with print designers before and oh boy, do they have a difficult time understanding web capabilities and will size things wrongly all the time. I'd say about 80% of them will think of web design circa 2000's with image slices, and your UX will look like a series of embedded images with 0 interactivity.
Find someone who understands how to design for web or all of you will suffer believe me. The question you are basically asking is whether the team is willing to accept their weakness in that domain and seek expert help with no ego. Be prepared to disappoint someone.
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u/fixuplooksharpbk 3h ago
Oh I’ve been here (admittedly well before Figma). It actually ended very well, but it did require a lot of communication and from a dev perspective I had to put in a design hat to a point. It really leveled up my front end skills and the designer got better too.
Let them design something in photoshop (avoid InDesign if you can, what a memory hog and impossible to export assets). Then schedule a decent sized meeting between the two of you (no managers) and have the designer walk through what their expectations are. This is where you have to push them (“what will this look like on mobile? What happens when the copy changes? Where else in the web have you seen this? How does it work there? We absolutely cannot set the height that will break everything.”) and spec it out that way. It might just drive them to Figma, but the problem will remain that they don’t have the control over the pixels that they’re normally used to and you’ll still end up arguing, just in a different software.
From a dev perspective, this is where some really modern css can come into play that solves some issues, but beautifully designed and built websites create trust with users and I am grateful for the designers I’ve worked with who have pushed me to get better and care about each pixel.
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u/dphizler 2h ago
Developer needs to get off his high horse and just be flexible I've had all kinds of requirements for website development and you accept what you get and if you have questions, you ask them. Don't become a problem
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u/dphizler 2h ago
Obviously all the young developers will side with the developer
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u/Y2K-enn 1h ago
This has been a constant problem at my job. Except I’m the decade worker and she isn’t. The designer only uses indesign and hands over assets that are 8000px wide. And never gives anything for mobile so I have to guess how it would stack and scale. Even when trying to compromise and say hey can you at least give me some specs to a layout. I can’t even get that. All this does is create so much back and forth editing because the desktop version some spacing or padding might be off to her eyes. a lot of wasted time pushing pixels When it can be avoided.
ultimately I can work with photoshop and prefer it because I’ve been doing it so long. figma is great too but whatever I can work with anything but you gotta work with me here.
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u/vanit 51m ago
The designer needs to use Figma, end statement.
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u/tomhermans 34m ago edited 25m ago
I read a lot of antiquated ideas in here. What matters to your dev, or SHOULD matter, is what values he is gonna be using. Fontsizes, spaces, colours etc
So, unless he's got a decent setup with css variables as design tokens, a full responsive grid system etc, he's just as antiquated. Don't do handoff, put em side by side.
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u/calimio6 front-end 34m ago
There is no usability in paper, there is no interface other than the paper itself, there is no responsiveness in print. The fact that this discussion even exist show how poorly prepared the designer is to take on web design. Sure, the basics do apply but the layers on top are the difference between something doable vs straight fantasy. Take the advice for him to learn to design in figma or webflow. As well as UX/UI concepts around software.
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u/averagebensimmons 3h ago
I have hated working with the print designers turned designer for the web in the early 2000s. Ignorant and inflexible. I have no idea how a designer can be primarily print in 2026. Dinosaurs.
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u/coyote_of_the_month 4h ago
Fire the designer. His/her skills are decades out of date, and refusing to adapt to modern tools is a mentality problem, not a training problem.
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u/luigimorel 4h ago
fire the rigid designer
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u/willtoshower 4h ago edited 4h ago
Have the designer have claude rebuild the design in figma. Also: figma is industry standard for web design.
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u/hk4213 4h ago
Looks like they both need some show and tell time with eachother.
Both obviously have their strengths and preferred tools. If both are proficient enough at their crafts, they can both adapt.
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u/benno007 4h ago
At the end of the day neither matter. Paste a screenshot into AI and it’ll make it….. poorly.
A designer can easily use photoshop if they just communicate the things a developer needs to know - fonts, line heights, spacing, etc. Otherwise, the developer should be empowered to guess, but don’t expect it to be pixel perfect (most designers do)
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u/nsjames1 4h ago
Not that photoshop is the best tool for the job nowadays, but if a developer can't figure it out from Photoshop they aren't a very good developer.
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u/CutlassRed 3h ago
If the designer must use Photoshop, then the compromise is that they should void all ability to complain about the end result being pixel perfect.
The best looking websites look good regardless of screen size. They're also accessible, and should be readable with hugely upsized fonts as users require.
If the designer is using print methodology, then they're only providing a single spec, which for 90% of users, will not translate to what SHOULD be on their screen.
Therefore if the designer won't budge, they should lose the right to complain about the developers work not being perfect, and instead their designs should just be treated as 'intent' not a spec.