Best Practices for Design-to-Web

October 28, 2011 by RobM

Understanding how to properly prepare your design files for web can save everybody (designer, web developer, and end client) time and money, (and keep your programmers happy too).

When programming for the web, industry standards are easily identified - programmers can follow W3.org international compliancy and then use a validator tool (see: http://validator.w3.org)  as a quality assurance check on the finished product. However, in the design world a validator tool doesn't exist (or at least not that we know of, and we'd love to know!). For this reason, we've created a design specific document that we make available to designers. This document represents years of understanding, experimenting, and fine-tuning. In fact, this document is constantly evolving, and we generally make at least one amendment to it every couple months. It includes things like: selecting the right fonts, using layer effects correctly, and choosing proper dimensions (just to name a few).

Up until now, we've only ever shared this document with designers we've worked with, but we realized there is no reason we can't share it with the world! So please visit the design specifications page of our website , contact us with your questions, offer feedback/suggestions in the comments below, and make use of it on your next web project!

As mentioned, we regularly update this information so be sure to bookmark the page and tell your designer friends!