“A great design is always invisible”. - An oft repeated quote when it comes to Web Design.

Picture this. You are visiting a friend who has recently bought a new house. They present you their new abode with a flourish. And it is indeed a beautiful house. Wonderfully designed, great ambiance with plenty of sun and fresh air and natural light. Delightful use of colors for the walls, classy wood floor appeals to you. Now take a second and think. Who will you credit for this house? The interior designer for what you see in the rooms. The architect for how the house is designed with such care and attention. And for one minute, you will marvel at how two different people worked on their individual skills and created such the lovely house that your friend bought. Right?

Now imagine a website. Beautiful. Clean. Responsive. Interactive. You know all the adjectives that can be used here for a website. So who do you compliment? The designer, right? What a lovely interface. What a brilliant use of colors, what a stunning choreography of content right.

Why not the developer?

Because the Developers are the Dark Knights of Web Development. Their work is in the background and makes the backbone of a web or mobile application. They are the ones who get down in the vast pit of complex architectures and servers to create a solid foundation and make everything functional with their logic and programming skill; a foundation on which stands the whole website. Now ask yourself. Why is it so? Naturally, any rational thought would imply that  a developer and a designer are at equal footing when it comes to receiving credit for a website. After all, without programming and without understanding how to ensure something functions as intended while ensuring every variation of the particular function is handled, a website would be rife with constant letdowns, crashes and errors.

From the first ideation to the end product, the truth is, Design and Development are a beautifully synchronized process. The Developers are responsible for the functionalities interim to the web pages and the server while the Designers handle the interactions between a web page and a user. Both work as two sides of the same coin. The developers are the architects who understand and provide reason as to how an element of website works and ensure that it works smoothly in order to enhance the design.

They prepare the server architecture and databases that will be the very fabric on which a website is etched. They program the web pages to work together seamlessly to provide the quickest, smoothest way of achieving the predetermined results, all the while ensuring the functions are error free. They provide the fuel to the design with their development skills, their command over how to make each webpage behave, how each element interacts, how every piece of machinery in the virtual engine that is the user interface, work perfectly to create a seamless fluid design.

With changes in the industry, both designers and developers have taken the initiative of learning about the other side and making sure that collaborations are based on mutual understanding and clarity. A balance between the design and its development and how well they are synchronized provides a the user either an awesome or not so great user experience. Several designers now take time to learn HTML, CSS, PHP basics in order to fluently express their expectations while developers have started exploring the design views in Fireworks, Dreamweaver in order to better understand how a designer adapts an idea into a visual and how to provide the necessary framework required for that visual.

At Vinfotech, with our motto of UI Focused Engineering, our own developers and designers often meet and sit together to discuss the latest trends and changes that are an integral part of a dynamic industry such as ours and our projects are a meticulous collaboration between our designers and developers. The developer is as much a part of design as a designer is part of the development. One builds, the other beautifies. One provides the soul of a website, the other creates the body.

The design may be the storyteller, sure. But the developer is the publisher of that story. They work together to bring you the tales of a dream that seeks to fly in any website, in any project.

So next time you see a lovely website that you like, take a minute and marvel at how someone put time into creating a lovely, sturdy, robust foundation for this beautiful website.