Designer + Developer
Relatively speaking, I'm pretty new to the Flash world. I never slugged through the AS1 days like many of the seasoned warriors out there. I've only worked on a few large Flash projects, and I've generally always worked in the same way.
I had a designer (or designers) who knew flash and were able to create .swfs for me to use. Then I wrote my code (in Eclipse+MTASC) that would load and manipulate those assets they provided. I'd use XRay to figure out how things were structured or named. Occasionally I'd have to remind them to add instance names, or not to name multiple things the same thing, but very rarely would I ever fire up the Flash IDE. Sometimes we'd have a pre-design meeting to talk about things like structure or file naming or whatever, but it was always pretty generic stuff
Lately, I've had two different encounters with other developers who work in a completely different fashion. They take the .fla from the designer, completely rip it apart, and then put it back together in a way that makes sense to them.
Now, I know some designers just aren't capable of making a logical structure for their assets, but some can. In fact, those two encounters I mentioned the designer was the same guy I usually work with and I know he did the same sorts of things I expect from him.
The problem with ripping it apart and putting it back together is now, the next time the designer changes something you need to somehow propagate those changes from the designer's work to your own work. I couldn't imagine I'd ever want to take on the role of managing versions of assets within a file during development, even if that meant the assets weren't made how I would have done them.
So it confuses me when a developer will just automatically start in that style of development no matter what the asset structure looks like. Even if stuff wasn't delivered in a logical manner, I'd want to work with the designer instead of just ripping it apart myself.
Maybe I just haven't been bitten by poor designers like others. Maybe my software engineering background makes me fundamentally think different from the flash developers who come more from a design background. How do you guys prefer to work. Is that different from how you actually end up working?
Oh well.. I guess that's my little rant for the week.
I had a designer (or designers) who knew flash and were able to create .swfs for me to use. Then I wrote my code (in Eclipse+MTASC) that would load and manipulate those assets they provided. I'd use XRay to figure out how things were structured or named. Occasionally I'd have to remind them to add instance names, or not to name multiple things the same thing, but very rarely would I ever fire up the Flash IDE. Sometimes we'd have a pre-design meeting to talk about things like structure or file naming or whatever, but it was always pretty generic stuff
Lately, I've had two different encounters with other developers who work in a completely different fashion. They take the .fla from the designer, completely rip it apart, and then put it back together in a way that makes sense to them.
Now, I know some designers just aren't capable of making a logical structure for their assets, but some can. In fact, those two encounters I mentioned the designer was the same guy I usually work with and I know he did the same sorts of things I expect from him.
The problem with ripping it apart and putting it back together is now, the next time the designer changes something you need to somehow propagate those changes from the designer's work to your own work. I couldn't imagine I'd ever want to take on the role of managing versions of assets within a file during development, even if that meant the assets weren't made how I would have done them.
So it confuses me when a developer will just automatically start in that style of development no matter what the asset structure looks like. Even if stuff wasn't delivered in a logical manner, I'd want to work with the designer instead of just ripping it apart myself.
Maybe I just haven't been bitten by poor designers like others. Maybe my software engineering background makes me fundamentally think different from the flash developers who come more from a design background. How do you guys prefer to work. Is that different from how you actually end up working?
Oh well.. I guess that's my little rant for the week.
Labels: Actionscript, Flash
posted by Marc at
10:29 AM
5 Comments:
I've work a lot with designer and I'm original a designer and my experience is that most designers don't understand the logic of an actionscript powered flash project (they are used to Tween).
What I do is rebuild the fla (before we had Flex) with the assets made by the designer (With Flex I create a library with the assets and use that in a css). So basically I just restructure the file.
Unfortunately designers mostly forget to position everything on a round number so lines get blurry.
By
Unknown, At
8/16/2007 12:22 PM
I've worked on projects that the designer only pass me some photoshop file. And another project I need to work with a freehand file with lots of 10MB TIF image files...
By
Anonymous, At
8/16/2007 10:34 PM
I am a designer migrated to Flash OOP Developement.
I would not begin the developement of a project if the design hasn´t been approved. You know how much it cost to make changes.
There are a few people who can design and programm but it is not easy to find designers programming or programmers designing.
The best option for me is to take the PSD and convert it into a .fla (specially in CS3). If there are changes you shall import the same image again with the same name.
By
Anonymous, At
8/17/2007 12:26 AM
Maybe I've just been amazingly lucky with the two designers I've worked with. In both cases they access our version control system and can modify their assets at any point in time. Since I'm not modifying them I get updates to assets when they change and it "just works". The projects I've been working on tend to be larger multi-developer projects that last over the course of a year or more. If I had to wait for designs to be 100% approved, the project would be 6 months late.
As far as non-flash content... usually we set up a directory structure and naming convention for those assets and I read them in at runtime instead of integrating them into a .fla.
By
Marc, At
8/17/2007 4:27 AM
Amen
It always pisses me off on large projects that there is such a wall that design is tossed over. It's rare you see programmers just toss over a pile of code and expect a designer to just pick it up.
There is an assumption that however illogical the timeline is, that it can be made functional. It's one of the reasons working with designers the IA/Flow aspect is so critical to get right prior to them delving knee deep into design. It make sure that the segmentations are clean.
By
Unknown, At
9/21/2007 11:37 PM
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