How to check designer's layout?

Question

HTML

Hey guys, this is the situation at work. A new leader has come to our small company, I myself have less than half a year of experience in layout, in addition to me, a developer and designer in the java department. So now the designer shows me the layouts, and I have to say what is good and what is bad. It’s clear that it’s more correct and better, but a designer with good experience and questions about his layouts is always minimal for me, and even more so, I don’t know where to look rather because of my inexperience, hence the question is what should I pay attention to on his layouts, what comments should I make and so on
I apologize for the confusion, I hope the idea is clear.

Answer 1

I will write about my relationship with designers. I must say right away that not all of them are experienced, some until recently were engaged in printing and do not always understand the nuances of the web.
Fonts first. I always tell designers to either use the safe fonts that everyone has or the ones that are on Google Fonts. If you really want some other one, then let them check that it is not limited by a license and is freely distributed, otherwise there will be fuss with converters, in which many fonts are blacklisted.
Well, the number of inscriptions. Maybe from a design point of view, 20 styles of one font is the use of one font. But from the point of view of the developer, this is the connection of 20 fonts, there is no need to talk about the acceptable page weight. The same goes for graphics, although now there is fast Internet, but you should not force the user to wait for the download.
Uniformity. Experienced designers do not have such problems, but inexperienced ones, especially girls, for some reason consider it quite normal to make h1 green without underlining on one page of the layout, and black and underlined on the other, one button blue, and on the other page a similar button - yellow . Check that the designer has developed a common concept.
Another good check is counter questions to the designer, especially if the site is responsive or has some kind of tricky behavior. Ask him "How should the left block behave if we narrow the window to 700 pixels", "And this banner is pressed to the top with an indent or aligned vertically in the center, it's not clear from the layout" or something else tricky. Either he will explain and tell you how it should be laid out, or he will say "damn, but I didn’t foresee this." Profit in both cases :)
I remember one more moment. The designer drew a layout, the usual layout is: header, footer, sidebar, content area. But in the content area, the elements were arranged quite cunningly. Well, that is, how cunning it is, for a layout designer, it's not a problem, only the customer himself fills this area through the admin panel using Tiny MCE, CKEditor or something else similar. Of course, it is unlikely that the customer will be able / want to reproduce all
this beauty with the help of a visual editor. Therefore, the detailed content of news, articles, etc. in the layout should be quite typical, without frills.

Answer 2

https://github.com/andrey-hohlov/psd-templates-req...
Most of it is relevant for Sketch / AI

Answer 3

And here's more: https://github.com/nicothin/web-design

Answer 4

In general, usually the designer of the layout designer is tormented so that everything is in accordance with the layout, you have some kind of strange office. The only wish for the designer is to teach him how to design on a grid. And of course, all source codes, such as fonts, icons, layouts for display on mobile devices, etc. - he should provide you. Evaluate in terms of what is good or bad in terms of design - you are not competent.

Answer 5

OK. I will say as a person working in a creative studio where designers are for all sorts of tough guys.
We have the correct one that I introduced a year ago - designers SHOULD NOT think about HOW their designs will be implemented in life. Never ever. Their task is to make a design that will be cool and, most importantly, sell. The layout designer's task is to implement this in a working prototype.
From all this we extract the answer - to all questions from designers whether the design is suitable, you must answer YES. Even if there is fear and horror :)

Answer 6

It's simple - everyone should be responsible for their area of ​​competence. You are incompetent in design and it is not your responsibility to decide what is best in terms of design. You can control its layouts only from the position of the knowledge in which you are an expert.
What should you do? Understand that if the site does not sell, then the problem can be anything (layout, backend, design, usability, call center, product, SEO) and not take responsibility for these areas, saying that you can only be responsible for layout . You can't approve the design, that's what art directors do.

Answer 7

Most likely when "the designer shows me the layouts, and I have to say what is good and what is bad" - he simply collects an opinion. No need to know where to look and what to pay attention to - just look where you want and notice what you want.
That's what a designer is for, to figure out for himself what to do with your "seemingly ridiculous answers." If the user remembers "oh, my milk ran out" probably = the user cannot focus on the layout for more than 500ms, remove details, strengthen the call to action ..