Designer + Developer Workflow
I’ve had the extreme privilege of collaborating on a bunch of projects with my friend Dan Mall (@danmall) over the last five and a half years. Dan is a designer. I’m a developer. And together, we’ve been refining our process to be as collaborative as possible.
We talk about designer & developer collaboration in conference talks, workshops, client engagements, team coaching sessions, and more. Hell, I even wrote all about it in my book. But we’ve never really actually shown how we actually do work together. Until now.
Dan and I recorded an almost two-hour long video that details our collaborative process. Here it is:
We had a lot of fun making this, and I hope it’s valuable to designers and developers who want to establish a more collaborative workflow with their colleagues. We’re definitely open to doing follow-up videos if there’s an appetite for it!
Dan also wrote a post about this video on his blog, where he does a great job framing this whole process. So I won’t say too much more; instead I’ll just share a bunch of the links we pulled up during the video:
- Pattern Lab
- Vue.js Guide
- WordPress Codex
- Dan’s initial font pairing and nav exploration
- Lightning Design System
- Grid By Example by Rachel Andrew
- Fluid Type by Trent Walton
- Atomic Design Methodology
- The Part and the Whole
- Color in Design Systems by Nathan Curtis
- Your Sketch Library is not a Design System / Redux
- Creating Themeable Design Systems
- Operator Font
Also, a quick technical note: I’m kicking myself because we just jumped right into this without any planning. Because of that, I grabbed a severely outdated version of my vanilla Pattern Lab starter kit that doesn’t include Pattern Lab’s incremental builds or a lot of our current Gulp processes. Those things do a lot to improve Pattern Lab’s build time to next to nothing. If we do another video, I’ll be sure to have fixed that to actually show a more realistic Pattern Lab build process.
Anyways, hope you enjoy this!