What the Art Designer needs to give to the Web Developer

Generally speaking the artist needs to view their design not as a design but as a layout, very similar to printing in terms of setting up the page itself.

The Web Developer needs to know specific placement or location information for each and every page element or section of the design.

For example - lets say you have a design with a Header area - below that on the left hand side are information boxes and to the right of those is a main content area.

Typically a designer will give the developer the design and say " I designed it to look like this"

That's great but what the developer needs to know is:

How wide is the header area to be
How far from the left hand side of the screen
How far down from the top of the window should it be.
How far below the header is the left column to start
How wide is the left column itself
etc... you get the point

So in this example the designer should include a page layout spec sheet and it might look like this:

Page Layout:

Header 890 px wide x 150 px height
Start Header 50 px from the top of the Browsers window
Start header 35 px from the left of the browsers window
Left column 25 px below header
Left Column 200 px wide x 400 px height
Left column 35 px from the left of the browsers window

The reason developers take so long sometimes in creating the layout of the Designers pages is because with out the Page Layout information it's guess work for the most part by the developer and much unnecessary back and forth between the 2 occurs.

Web Developers are not designer and designers are not web developers, for the most part. Designers tend to assume that because they have include the image in a Photoshop layer that the developer has all the information they need.

Not true developers end up spending far too much time trying to figure out what the designer wants and Photoshop is not the greatest tool in the developers tool box. Photoshop is very non users friendly, from the developers standpoint and although the information they need is most likely in the photoshop file itself, since the developer does not use photoshop regularly they spend wasted time and effort just trying to find the information they need to create the page layout.

So Designers help your developers always provide a page layout spec sheet to help move the project along faster.