Do You Let Your Designers Loose on SharePoint?

Do you let your designers loose on your development SharePoint?

This is how we work:

• A designer would imagine and mockup the design using a graphics tool – such as Photoshop
• After the mockups are signed off, we let the designers work on the actual page
• Give them designer permissions to your development site and let them loose with SharePoint designer!

There are many reasons why we believe that designers should work directly in SharePoint, with SharePoint designer:

• In all areas of .NET development, whether it be ASP.NET, WCF or SilverLight, designers are more and more involved with the actual project beyond mockups
• It helps them understand the limitations of SharePoint, which helps their future design to play to its strengths
• They are also better at CSS and DOM than a typical developer, as well as more cross-browser aware
• They are able to make a call on how close a designer can be bent when the implementation is hard or impossible - with developers who can't make that call, they may end up spending a lot of time failing to get the last 2 pixel perfect
• SharePoint designer is sufficiently powerful and offers the only experience currently available for building with SharePoint sites
• SharePoint has built-in check-in and check-out, as well as version controls, publishing and approval controls - all of which are excellent for team development

The major drawback for a designer is the complexity of a SharePoint masterpage:

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Figure: Bad - Nasty looking masterpage

Luckily, we always start with a clean-minimal masterpage, which gives our designers full freedom to implement their vision:

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Figure: Good - clean-minimal masterpage