Some time ago the Woman's Hour on the BBC Radio 4 website was re-designed. I visit the Listen Again page on a regular basis to check if there are any items I want to add to my Radio 4 A to Z listing.

I am guessing thet this site was not designed on a Wednesday, the designer must have put Monday or Tuesday into their Photoshop text layer without remembering that Wednesday would take up the most space.



Oops!



Now the sad thing is that no-one has fixed this minor problem. The designer obviously never looked at the finished page on a Wednesday and the person who maintains this site just doesn't care enough to do anything about the problem.
The BBC Guidelines state that "Fonts MUST be resizable in all supported browsers."
Well they have made the font resizable, but the design certainly isn't.

I think that Photoshop (or similar app) should be banned from the design process.
When a designer uses Photoshop they can spend a lot of effort making a screen mockup look elegant and beautiful. It can be printed out and passed around at meetings where it becomes the design itself because people can see it as a thing of beauty and quality.
Give the designers plenty of paper and lot of quality pens so they can spend their time designing rather than embellishing a snapshot of a static design that can never exist as a living breathing entity.
When I am building an application the code is already written in my head before I touch my keybpard. Designers should have all aspects of their designs in their heads before they can be seen as perfect looking images by others.
Would we ever have seen Snow White if the animators had used Photoshop instead of pen and paper?
Animators know that they have to design animated characters as fully formed beings. They don't spend hours working on the nostril hairs. Instead they use character model sheets to produce something that describes the essence of the character.
Character Model Sheets are the templates of the characters used by the animation staff. They provide the construction, structure, proportion, design, etc. for each character. Usually, several models sheets are needed for each character to show the physical and design nuances. Each animator, artist has their own style of drawing. The model sheet guides the 300 or so artists working on the production toward making all the characters look “ON MODEL”. “ON MODEL” means the model sheets have been followed to perfection as if one artist (instead of over 300 ) has drawn the character.
Designers need to put away their hi-tech tools and go back to designing rather than painting by numbers.
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