Website construction from a third party's design

A recent web design project of mine has been to build the front end to a site that will contain some dynamic, customer-managed content. Now that's fine. However, the customer used a design agency to design the look and feel of the site. This always fills me with a level of intrepidation as more often than not, the designer charged with providing the design has little web knowledge. I was provided with photoshop files representing the relevant pages. A very nice-looking design, but an absolute nightmare to build. That's not strictly true. Easy enough to build if you would be happy to splice and dice images and throw those together in a table, but to build a site with any integrity and especially robust enough to cope with dynamic content, a nightmare.

Oh its all very nice to create a design with a fixed height with fixed text that will never change in size or amount. Then you can do all manner of appealing things with gradient backgrounds, curved boxes, overlapping images. Oh it was enough to make me weep. Now given a few weeks of experimentation, I might have been able to do something that almost resembled the design, but I don't have a few weeks. Despite all the cunning css curved boxes/borders tricks, curved corners are still a headache to build. They still clutter up code and still rely on unecessary images, even if they do look quite appealing. I often question whether anyone notices enough to warrant the extra time, effort and code required. But designers are obsessed with them (I'm allowed to mock designers because I am one).

So I sat and whinged a bit, squinted and huffed, thought 'what the hell am I gonna do with this?' several times over, and then had a bash. I'd pretty quickly worked out what I thought would not be possible and decided my best course of action was to show the client where the design would fall down. I created a page, having had to omit some of the design niceties even at this stage, and then changed the font size via the browser to show how increasing the size would break the page. How all the neatly aligned boxes would change height, how an image would no longer align with the foot of the page, how suddenly you would get ugly white space at the top of the adjacent column and how the menu would kick over two lines. I also created a version that broke when more text was added. I then made another page, simplified and adapted to be 'web friendly' that I felt still sensitively captured the essence of the original design and showed that to the client. To be honest, I don't think they noticed that half of the borders didn't have curved corners or that some of the background gradients had been removed. I then showed how it would adapt to increased font size and increased content. The client was perfectly satisfied with this.

Incidentally, one of the page designs showed two columns of continuous copy. Hmm that would have been straightforward for the customer to update.

Now I've built sites from print designers's designs many times over the years and I am only too aware of their fundamental lack of understanding for what a website is and what needs to be considered when designing for the web. And I don't have a problem with this. Why should they? If day to day they design for print, they wouldn't know how a website should work, how its constructed and how it varies across browsers and how it needs to adapt to changing content. A customer will automatically approach their design company when they consider a website and that's fair enough - they are looking to extend their branding and their identity to the web. And designers are often happy to listen to advice and allow me to adapt their designs as I see fit. Being a designer, I like to think I do this with an awareness for what they are trying to achieve. Its often a refreshing experience and a challenge as it allows you to get outside your own design mindset and work on something that's differently approached. Sometimes trying to realise someone else's vision forces you to discover new techniques and breaks you out of a web designer's mentality. However there some fundamental web design rules that need to be at least acknowledged if not followed.

What annoyed me in this instance was that on visiting the agency in question's site, they actually sell web design as a service. Was a bit baffled therefore as to why they weren't building the site and why they'd provided me with what I can only describe as a print designer's web page design.