Welcome to the Compass Designs website, powered by Joomla 1.5! The goal of this new site is to be the place to bookmark if you are looking for quality Joomla templates, tutorials, news and tips.What Graphical Designers Need to Understand About a CMS
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Brian Teeman of www.joomlatraining.co.uk asked me to make a post for the weekly rant column in his new Joomla newsletter. I thought I would write something about the challenge of getting graphic designers to understand the dynamic nature of Joomla.
We occasionally get clients who are completely fixated on the exact design work of pages to a super detailed level. Having a consistent look and feel is important, that's part of having a professionally designed templates. Sometimes this goes to the extreme of wanting exact text or titles with pixel perfect positioning or having us specific non-web safe font.
To me this seems like it misses an important point of a content management system, the ease with which you can change content. Let me give an example.
Recently someone wanted an exact font for their menu. This meant we would have to use image replacement, effectively hard coding the text as an image. The result was something like this:
We developed a rollover sprite menu using the font they wanted. In a static website this is all well and good, but in a dynamic content management system you have now locked yourself in to the text used on the menu links. If you want to change one of the words it will take you 45 minutes work with Fireworks, an FTP manager and the template files. Compare that to the two seconds it would have taken if you had used a web safe font.
My thought is if you want to use a content management system don't turn around and cripple it by having overly exact graphical specifications. The technology employed to do this almost always involves a reduction in the dynamic nature of what's on the page.
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JP2 Designs
said:
| I think this just highlights one of the many reasons why it is important to work with a graphic designer who understands the web and is willing to learn about its many ups and downs otherwise you will have problems like this all the time. Luckily my business partner is one of the few who understands and is willing to learn about the web. |
TomDavis
said:
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I appreciate this blog and encourage more discussion and tips on this topic. Graphic designers are artists in many ways but even artists have to learn about and work with the media. In the same way the paint and canvas manufacturers must work with the artists. Those of you that have been down the trail of merging graphic design with CMS have a lot of good advice for us who are just beginning. How have you communicated the range of graphic possibilities with CMS? Seems like the graphic designer throws up their hands with all the options with template content and trie to set rules. |
Simon Williams
said:
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Why shouldn't designers be able to specify pixel perfect aspects to their web site? 45 minutes to create a new button, you need to find a new designer. A good designer will be able to open, edit and create a new button in less than 5 minutes, if not they haven't done their job correctly, especially if it is to create a graphic as simple as the one above. Imagine if every web site used a web safe font and nothing else? BORING. In many cases I believe you should restrict the main content elements of your web site otherwise how the hell do you control the interface? Interface design is so important in creating a good web site. It is one of the core components to good usability. All of a sudden you can end up with a page of menu items with one item in each subsection, dreadful. Reduce the number of clicks a user needs to make to get to content. Look at how magazines are created, they are designed in a pixel perfect fashion. Web sites are just a massive leap forward in printed media. How many magazines that sell well are designed dreadfully? Not many. The same people that buy magazines read web sites. There are subtle differences but that is a techno issue. Just because you as a programmer cannot see and understand the subtle differences doesn't mean they do not exist, I bet you get riled by designers who don't understand the complexities of writing efficient code. Web design is complex, there are far too many cowboys out there making a killing and getting it wrong, they are developers AND designers. Come on people lets work together and push things forward. Only a bad designer will cripple a good CMS, what about a bad CMS not being able to handle good design?? Rant over. |
Administrator
said:
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Interesting points Simon. Actually, I wouldn't call myself a programmer, or a designer. Just a guy with a blog? A clarifying note, that was not a button. It was a 4 state sprite driven menu with 10 links (40 images). The point I was making was that to change the name of a link, you had to change the hard coding and images, an involved task. I see this as defeating the whole point of a dynamic CMS. |
Gav
said:
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I couldn't agree more with this. I have many clients asking for the silliest of changes and want things to be exact to the point of perfection. Even after explaining that sometimes what might appear one way in IE differs in Firefox. I'm a web designer (or hope to be one) that uses CSS to control the styling of the page to it's maximum capability. Photoshop is great for creating gradients and graphical elements and Flash is great for folio stuff but CSS is the best for accessible / usable websites and cross platform capability which to me means it's a bad business decision to go any other way. Now with the use of mobile devices to access content on the WWW it will become much more important to follow fluid design standards and use web safe content. |
BYGino
said:
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I'm trying very hard not to start a debate here as I understand very well the pros/cons of design v's developement, so much so that I chose to do both. I thought one of the biggests advantages of CMS was not for us designers/developers but for our customers? The ability for our customers to change not only content but also things like menu systems comes above all else and is the biggest selling point of this type of platform. So why would you restrict the benefits that Joomla! give them by making your customer have to call you every time they need to add a new menu to their site? I personally would in some ways like to do this as it would mean repeat custom from my clients but in the end, that is not what it's all about and that is why I just wouldn't do it. Come on guys, remember, it's not about us, it's about our clients - where would you be without yours? |
julz_hk
said:
| Is there an imagemagick mambot that automatically renders CMS menus into a graphical one? Hmm...I might have to start a project. |
Phanerothyme
said:
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I think Simon Williams makes very salient points about real-world environments. A top level menu shouldn't be changing all the time - consistency of position, content and behaviour is important for a site that gets a lot of repeat visits. Because joomla allows great complexity in structure and appearance does not mean all joomla sites need to make full use of that facility. So even if your sloth like photoshoppers take 45 minutes to produce a new multi state graphic for a menu item, you're only doing it once a month at most. Consider the fluid tab model, with CSS styled text and sliding door backgrounds - each tab stretches to accommodate the menu text. Hand this over to a customer, and the following week you may see that the main menu has now got 18 items on it, and is wrapping onto two lines, throwing the whole tab menu out of kilter. Ultimately I think - what does this site *need*? If it's an arty visual site with a strong emphasis on corporate identity, then I'd certainly consider a fully pre-rendered menu. |
chaz_winter
said:
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I see no reason to preclude a graphic-based menu from the CMS arsenal. The basic states can be created via sprite and the font specifics can be dictated using CSS ( #font-face ). The main issue then is the potential for lengthy menu-links that extend beyond the dimensions of the fixed graphic. Nothing is perfect. |
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