Help settle a debate I have with a designer
Hi all, my designer at work and I have a disagreement. Can someone more experienced settle this argument. This is the problem that I brought to his attention:
When analyzing his XD visuals I noticed that some content (mainly images) tend to spill out of the bounds of the main layout containers. Now I don't mind adjusting certain containers to match the design, I have no problem with that. However in some cases his images are 'touching' the sides of the XD canvas.
The screenshot attached demonstrates one such example. The red lines are demonstrating the main layout container that runs through the website. As you can see the image not only spills beyond the main container (which is not a problem) but it's also touching the canvas.
So I approached the designer and asked him for clarification in regards to what responsive behaviour this image (or parent container) should have. Initially, I have allowed the parent container to have a width of 100% because that's what the visual was showing. However, in reality 100% width on parent element makes that particular section stretch full width on ultra-wide screens, making that section appear badly and all over the place (image gets to stretch 100% to the left, increasing its height in process and making the contact form on the right seem tiny. Oh and overall layout just looks like crap because of it).
So instead of width 100% I put that section inside Bootstrap's "container-fluid" which matches the rest of website's layout anyway, and thought of it as a job done.
But here's the argument - once I approached my designer for clarification, he said that I should not put everything into a responsive container with capped size. He insisted that I should be making everything using percentages and he doesn't see a problem with such layout.
6 Replies
I know that doesn't sound right to me, but being a lot newer to this industry than him, I couldn't quite explain why what he was saying is incorrect. Please help me settle the debate by providing your opinions and maybe some kind of resource that I could link to him (maybe designers101 guide? 🙂 )
The best way to explain it to him is to show him the issue when it's really big. Make it work like he said, and take a screenshot of it and send it to him, with the giant white-space that it's creating.
I'd screenshot it and not send it to him, because he might only test it within a pretty small range and say something like "see, it's fine".
If you send it to him and he says that's great and what it should look like, then 🤷
Thanks for the reply, makes sense to demonstrate this particular issue with a screenshot. However, I mentioned something along those lines to him in our initial conversation, but he rebutted that everything should be "percentage based so it looks good on all screens".
I even tried explaining that without a container to fix everything in the middle, if you're using ultra-wide screen and your layout is 100% width, then you would literally have to turn your head left to see the left side of the website and turn it in the opposite direction to see the content on the right side. The crux of the problem is that he disagrees with using fixed width container to place your layout inside fullstop.
That kinda annoys me because I know it's not true, but I lack the expertise to articulate my thoughts as to why exactly. He just kinda overpowers the conversation.
Leaving this thread open for now in case someone might link something I can use as a reference.
I mean, does he want it to stay 2-columns at small screens? Saying all percentage everything for all screens is like the old days of fluid design. There used to be a good page back in the day that showed that concept but I can't find it atm.
I'm not sure if I can find any articles about sites being too wide, specifically, but there's a lot of stuff on characters per line for readability.
Of course, he might also want the text to be percentage based, but that's easy to show why it's terrible by actually doing it.
I mean, there's always the "I'm not 100% sure we're on the same page, and to make sure that I don't spend too much time working on the wrong concept, could you send me over 4-5 websites that are like this so that I can use them as reference"
Either he doesn't find anything, he gets some examples of ugly sites, or he sends over some where it works well because they don't really do what he's saying, but if any argument comes up, you say you referenced it to his examples.
We actually ended our conversation with him saying that he would "find some websites for me to look at". So I guess we will just wait for that.
Thank you for your time @Kevin.
If anyone has any more thoughts or opinions, please do share.
hah, well that's good then 😄
I'd love to hear others' input here too for sure