How do ROR developers work with designers?

rubyonrails-talk
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Hi everyone-

I've developed a site with ROR, I thought I was ready to launch after a few hours of design. Boy was I wrong. I finally hired a guy in Pakistan to do the design. He came back with a beautiful design for about $200. Now I'm spending hours and hours and hours integrating my rails code with his design.

Can someone give me an idea of best practices for coders and designers working together? There has got to be a better way.

Thanks, Dino

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Spend more than $200 on a designer than knows Rails?

Or even better, partner with a designer to design as you go. It's usually a really bad idea to develop and application then try to slap a skin on it to make it look good. It's rare that you can really give enough time to usability or user experience if you do that.

--Jeremy

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dino d. wrote:

I've developed a site with ROR, I thought I was ready to launch after a few hours of design. Boy was I wrong. I finally hired a guy in Pakistan to do the design. He came back with a beautiful design for about $200. Now I'm spending hours and hours and hours integrating my rails code with his design.

Can someone give me an idea of best practices for coders and designers working together? There has got to be a better way.

Our designers are in the same room, and we hardly ever talk to them. They might as well be in Pakistan. (Most times!)

How are your unit tests?

When the designers give us new HTML, we run it thru this command line:

   tidy -i -asxhtml foo.html > app/views/my_controller/foo.rhtml

Then we beat the crap out of those pages with assert_xpath. Having well-formed and correctly-indented XHTML makes editing, refactoring, and TDD a breeze. I just pointed out to my pair, today, when we were looking at some old code that never saw tidy, that the tidied code had a tendency to _stay_ tidy over time, even if we sometimes had to nudge it a little to keep the indentation correct.

There's nothing like seeing a <div> up at the top, and knowing that its matching </div> is _exactly_ the one at the same indentation level, down at the bottom.

We have a few integration issues - rambunctious CSS is a major problem - but we generally have no show stoppers.

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Jeremy McAnally wrote:

Spend more than $200 on a designer than knows Rails?

Or even better, partner with a designer to design as you go. It's usually a really bad idea to develop and application then try to slap a skin on it to make it look good. It's rare that you can really give enough time to usability or user experience if you do that.

I forgot to mention: Our designers don't just throw skins over the wall. They will take our site, scrape off the HTML and CSS, re-brand it, change all the colors and graphics around, and throw _this_ over the wall. Then we configure our site to pull assets from named folders in the public/ folder. This gives us multiple product lines over the same core code.

We . They don't generally know Rails. Yes, the short communication path helps - our Onsite Customer shares an office with the head of Graphics - but the testing and tidy help a lot more. We launched a new site today, in only one working day, with one designer and two engineers on it.

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What about finding a well designed .css stylesheet with broad possibilities and then using it as we write the code? In my current project I took a combination of Beast and El Dorado and it seems to work ok. Is there a wonderful .css stylesheet out there for Rails that I could use consistantly? My applications are always have a 'business' look. Thank you, Kathleen

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I suppose it depends on how you use CSS.

Different businesses pay for applications that solve problems in different problem spaces. These different problem spaces demand different domain models.

If your stylesheet is tied to your domain model, a one-size-fits all is a non-starter.

My stylesheets tend to use selectors like

    // An application for managing a mail server     .domain .alias .forwards-to

    // A management application for an Internet hosting provider     #host_problems_query_form .hosts

    // A document exchange portal     #area_members .member .email     #area_members .membership-request .email

Ciao, Sheldon.

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Reinhart,

How does your designer charges?

Cheers, Sazima

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Kathleen,

I use the same approach for my personal projects, but sometimes the customer wants his own particular design on top of preexisting code. Then you have the sort of problems described above...

Cheers, Sazima

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How much...

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I think i can help you off the line.<<web.bloggers@gmail.com>>

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If you had been using Ruby In Steel you could have integrated his design quite simply using our Visual Rails Workbench. This lets you either do drag and drop page design in in Visual Studio itself or you can import/export designs to and from Dreamweaver or some other web design tool. Ruby In Steel takes care of deconstructing the pages and translating them into multi-file ERb templates then reconstructing them as HTML when you need to do the full-page visual design.

More info here:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Visual-Rails-Workbench-The-Import http://www.sapphiresteel.com/A-Brief-Guide-To-The-Visual-Rails http://www.sapphiresteel.com/A-Brief-Guide-To-The-Visual-Rails,235

best wishes Huw

SapphireSteel Software Ruby and Rails In Visual Studio http://www.sapphiresteel.com

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d3ntaku wrote:

hi reinhart -

i checked out your blog. do you do freelance rails consulting? i am working with some other people in indonesia and it seems you could teach them a lot.

is reinhart a german name?

tx,

/dc

On May 31, 12:54�pm, Rails Terrorist <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-

Thanks bro, Indonesia has many experienced rails and most of them are hired to Singapore, Pakistan, Malaysia and event USA. We have event for ruby conf, monthly or 3 monthly, in Jakarta that we called as Jakarta.rb.

Thanks for your offering partnership to me, we can talk privately trough email. Here is my email : Booking2Heaven [at] yahoo.com, maybe i know one of your people if they are active in indonesia ruby forum.

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Sazima wrote:

Reinhart,

How does your designer charges?

Cheers, Sazima

On May 31, 12:54 am, Rails Terrorist <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-

I charge my designer hourly. I use Australia standard hourly charge because indonesia hourly charge is lower than Australia's. I check daily his job online, or he send me file and sometimes he send me screen shot list.

Fortunately Indonesia has PayPal Payment Method, so that I can pay him by paypal. or bank transfer that is only charge me 5$ each transfer to Australia.

Imposible is nothing. It's easy to make designer understand rails unless you created your application by XML, FLEX, or Grails, you need expert designer then.

Reinhart http://teapoci.blogspot.com

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At my new job, the designer did the layout of the site including images and so on and it was my job to integrate that design with a Rails app. Every time I needed a new image I would just talk to the designer and he would have it done in minutes.

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This should come as no surprise but I'll say it anyway - if your remote designer does his/her job well and produces solid CSS-based layouts that appropriately subdivide the content areas of the page, you shouldn't have any major issues applying that layout to your rails app.

That being said, it always helps when you, the coder, understand enough design to be dangerous and vice-versa for him/her, the designer vis a vis Rails.

c.

Ryan Bigg wrote: