how you work with old school designer in mvc project?

[eluser]searain[/eluser]
When you as a programmer have to work on some web sites that heavily on design and you need to work with a professional designer who with little or none php knowledge, what would you do?

Such as

If the designer is not MVC oriented, it is kind hard for him to do a whole web site design works, if he has to follow me around, listen to my requests design this view and design that view constantly in the whole process, it will be not very productive.

In the traditional way, I still hide and separate the php codes from the designer as much as I can (in my experience with designer, use pseudo variables or not is not big deal. Just use meaning full variables names, the designer will know it no less than pseudo variables).

Due to the designer is very familiar with the traditional way, all I need is finishing my processing part coding etc. Give him a set of raw view pages, with html embedded with <?php echo $meaningfullvariables; ?>. and if it is first time for this designer, a quick introduction about php "if" "for" "while" structure in this view pages, the designer will take over these raw view pages, treat it as html and just work his way on it.

Say I can do two weeks work, and handle over to the designer, he can finish it and add the static pages part in two weeks with min. contacts with me. And then in final stage, we work together, wrap some small issues out and done with it.

But in MVC, you have so many view pages, you have to explain one by one to the designer if he is an old schooler.

Do you have this problem before?

I have been working with old school designer on none MVC system, no problem. But it seems that MVC and old school designer would be troublesome.

In other words, if you have to work with old school designer, you would still use MVC and spend extra time to deal with the designer, or use non MVC and spend extra time on your old school php programming? For example, these designer company looking for php developer to help them out. You have no way to change the designers if they are old school.

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
what i understand is that the designer needs full pages for his designs instead of partials. You could generate the pages he needs to design so he only has to deal with html.

[eluser]skunkbad[/eluser]
[quote author="blackhorse66" date="1245893185"]... In other words, if you have to work with old school designer, you would still use MVC and spend extra time to deal with the designer...[/quote]

It sounds like you are now a developer with a part time babysitting job. Perhaps you should look for somebody else to work with.

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
Just have him deliver full pages and then chop them up into views as needed. I work that way myself sometime, but I'm usually handing of the full HTML to, well, myself.

[eluser]cahva[/eluser]
Yeah, static html pages is the way to go. Or if you are like me, I want to have the PSD file and slice it up myself and get total control of the css and html Theres too many times that I've had some "great" html pages that some ad-agency dude has done with dreamweaver/Frontpage. Sometimes it takes more time to clean up these html pages than create one from scratch.

[eluser]searain[/eluser]
Due to our team was a design grows to web developing company. For a long time, programming is not just mostly for functioning but also large part for making the designer happy with their great designs. The customers and the company were "first is design, second is design, and third is design." and the design has to be the one in the world. At the same time the function part we still have to stand out. So the developing hours are high.

I believes we have to cut off the over designed part and go with the MVC in programming and lean and clean in design even the design looks close to other site.

Yeah, OK, I would go with asking for the static html for now, and chop them up into views. That I have done in old school anyway.

And I will try to go to the slicing psd file approach next. New dreamweaver has tools for that, right? I will check that out. Any advices here for a programmer to do slicing psd? What tool, what tutorial, and what is the good practice etc.?

Using MVC, we have to do more design works than the old school?

In old school, sometimes I offer the raw view pages to the designer, he would take these raw view pages and work with the other static content pages just like a static web site.

Or I would take his HTML design and embed php codes into it for the php view pages. But for the static content pages, it was still the designer's job and I don't have to pay any attention at all which are they and where are they, and how to navigate to them etc..

But in mvc, then I have to be the one to load every view pages. And if I take the html design or slicing the design from the designer, I have to be the one who do all these view pages' works of applying the design myself.

Well, I have no complaints for that. It is just like the designer's work will be reduced to offer one or a few design template pages either in html or psd. The programmer will take more design duties than before.

I think maybe for the same reason, we can see more and more sites on MVC or other frameworks becomes lean and clean, and heavily designed or over designed web sites are less and less.

Over designed "custom design" web sites are fading, because they are not compatible with MVC or other "new" technology. People cannot afford to stick with the old school design just to make over designers happy and have a over designed "great fancy design" web sites but stuck with old web technology and cannot be updated.

In simple words, with MVC, the web sites will become more and more clean and lean instead of "fancy" and over designed. Just my opinion.

[eluser]Daniel Moore[/eluser]
[quote author="cahva" date="1245904340"]Yeah, static html pages is the way to go. Or if you are like me, I want to have the PSD file and slice it up myself and get total control of the css and html Theres too many times that I've had some "great" html pages that some ad-agency dude has done with dreamweaver/Frontpage. Sometimes it takes more time to clean up these html pages than create one from scratch.[/quote]

Oh, isn't that the truth!

[eluser]NachoF[/eluser]
I would also love some help on how the whole "slicing up" thing works... I hate designing so if there were an easy way to convert a psd into xhtml/css it would really help me out.... I have dreamweaver, photoshop and fireworks but Im no good at either.... just plain old notepad++ coding

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
I'm hoping "slicing" was just a poor choice of words. Photoshop used to have a feature that "sliced" up and image and created a table-based HTML page from it. Bad, bad, bad route to go in this "modern" age.

Regardless of the PSD comp, the first thing that should be done is to plan out the most semantic possible HTML to represent the content you are serving. Then you take the design into consideration and add limited markup to achieve the look you need. Then you write CSS to implement the design.

See this tutorial

[eluser]cahva[/eluser]
By slicing up I just meant creating the images for the website. Yeah, actually there is a slicetool in photoshop. Its just a tool to segment the layout so that you can use in the webpage. It can save the sliced up image as html+images but ofcourse any self-respecting coder does not create the html with PS