What are the TOR criteria for a designer?

Question

Freelance

I would like to know how to correctly draw up a technical specification from a technical point of view, that is, so that later the design / PSD layout could be given to the layout designer and he did not say, where is it ...?
For example, there was such a question from the designer:
What width of the content should I do? 960 or 1000?
I myself am in design 0 and therefore this question put me into a stupor, I said 1024 was wrong or not, I don’t know.
What criteria should be for regular fixed layouts?
What criteria should be for responsive/mobile layouts?
As for the design elements, the effect of the buttons? pressing buttons so that it looks like a button and not like a picture. Whose job is this? designer or layout designer?

Answer 1

Immediately disclaimer: I'm not a designer, but quite often I accept their work. Everything below is my imho.

I would like to know how to correctly draw up a technical specification from a technical point of view, that is, so that later the design / PSD layout could be given to the layout designer and he did not say, where is it ...?

The main thing that should be in the TOR is a description of the functionality and business scenarios.
There is an opinion that it is better not to use font blurring, because it is impossible to make them perfectly cross-browser.

For example, there was such a question from the designer: What width of the content should I do? 960 or 1000?

The correct answer is 960 or 990, since 1000 in some older browsers may not fit into a 1024x768 screen when vertical scrolling is enabled. However, the question is rather tricky.

What criteria should be for regular fixed layouts?

In addition to the obvious things (all the requested functionality must be implemented), it is extremely useful to see how the layout behaves in the following cases:
a) if there is no content at all (for example, what the news feed looks like if there is no news) - very often they forget to draw.
b) if there is content, but string values ​​are extremely large (news title 1000 characters) - very often everything is drawn beautifully, but in reality there is much more content and everything works, or cropping appears where it should not be.
c) if there is content, but the string values ​​are extremely small. (news title 5 characters)

What criteria should be for responsive/mobile layouts?

All of the above + in fact, you need N design options for N resolutions that you consider necessary to support.
When making adaptive design, you need to understand that making a high- quality adaptive is about x2-x4 to the cost of designer services. An adaptive made by a blunder is useless and even harmful.
Separately, about the mobile version: study your audience. If your customers use modern smartphones, you don’t need a mobile version, it’s better to make mobile applications for ios / android.

As for the design elements, the effect of the buttons? pressing buttons so that it looks like a button and not like a picture. Whose job is this? designer or layout designer?

The designer necessarily draws the states of buttons, links, menu items, etc.
You do not need to do this in each layout, usually it is done separately.