Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

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My experience from starting WeekendHacker is that developers do know they need it.

In fact I have a lot of developers asking for design help (and luckily vice versa)

The format I use is a little more free form and it's curated which I hear a lot of people say help a lot.

Plus projects are fresh.

I have also tried to involve myself in OSP over the years.

The problem at least from my experience was that while developers have a clear process on how to work together amongst themselves. While they have created their own lingo. It doesn't really include the design process (unless they like me want to learn how to use GitHub) and how that ties into development.

There is clearly a disconnect between the two disciplines and I have yet to find a tool to allow for easy transcendence. You can't in my experience use the github principles for versioning of design, since iteration works completely different for most designers.

I have a couple of ideas of how that could be done, maybe I should start a WH project :)

Thom, I work with designers and git all the time (iOS dev)

Git does work for the design files (however less well than with the text the programmers work with).

I'd say generally speaking, it works better if you do design and cutups for a programmer who then implements a fork. He then submits the fork to the project to be merged in to the main project if the rest of the implementors agree.

Gotta find a front end programmer who likes you and thinks you're doing the right thing for that to pan out well.

It works when I have cut out the files and do the CSS/jQuery etc.

But my point is more about about design iterations within photoshop, fireworks etc.

Obvious problem is file size. It's going to be interesting to see whether LionOS will allow for some sort of integration with GitHub that allow for this.

The files are large, for sure, but not that huge. Is there some file size limit killing you or something at github in particular?

Or are you just referring to transit time (aka upload/download time)?

Not just that, although that is a problem IMO especially with PS where the files can get very big.

But also just a problem of state.

A lot of designers who use PS use layers and groups to show different scenarios within the same file.

But as I originally stated.

The reason why many designers don't joing these projects is because it doesn't take their way to work into account.

Yes you can learn to use Github or other versioning tools but that's not good enough if you ask me. Especially if you want to have more designers to participate.

Yeah, the everything in one giant file thing is a big problem for collaboration in general (even among designers).

I thought the reason many designers don't join the projects is because many technical people are surly when you try to tell them to put things here and here and here... etc.

It's not like you can't share a dropbox folder then occasionally check into the code base, or never check in the PSDs at all.

the nice thing about fireworks is that the fileformat is a viewable PNG when opened by someone without fireworks, so process files are visible by everyone involved.

i reckon we'll get to a point where early in a repo's life there'll be a concepts/design folder with process files - would also make sense to plan the architecture in the same fashion...hmmm the possiblilities

so that the dev planning the models/views can collaborate with a front-end designer as to the architecture of a site, but all within github etc etc etc. i can but hope.

I like that about fireworks too. But many designers love layers upon layers upon layers in the same file to do a whole project if possible.

That doesn't translate well in fireworks OR PSD if you want to collaborate well.

i agree, as a designer/front-end dev, that uses github, git versioning works on css (~ my tone doesnt translate to text) etc, so yeah there is a breakdown when asking designers to use git, but to be honest i manage fine, so i dont see why others cant do the same :)

Because many designers don't know how to code :) That doesn't mean they wouldn't be valuable for your project.

implying i said they wouldn't be valuable... I am a designer and git is not coding, its merely about learning a tool that helps with collaboration, git/github being one of many. :)

I have no problem using GitHub and I agree with you it's just a tool.

I am just saying that to many it IS coding.

i think we're on the same page. i can imagine that "GitHub for Mac" etc, might end up helping those designers that feel git is an unfathomable entity...

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