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Comment by mtogo | Hacker News Reader

This attitude that everyone should be a programmer bothers me. The designer's job is to design, and it's the programmer's job to integrate the designs.

Why don't you learn photoshop and how to do basic design? That way you don't need to ask the designer to do minor tweaks.

It doesn't work. If you've never used version control, "just learn git" can be a multi-week project. If you've never done design, "just learn photoshop" is the same.

Each person is on a team to do a specific job, let them do their jobs.

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Since when is learning/using git "being a programmer"?

A designer's job is to design and a programmer's job is to program. Both of those jobs require tools to make their jobs easier.

I'm sick of designers getting away with things programmers never would in their jobs. Programmers learn skills such as: organization (files and directories), communication (comments), workflow management (version control), etc. In my experience with designers, none of them care about things like that. You'll see 5 versions of PSDs filled with Untitled layers and no logical grouping.

These are things that are just expected of programmers and they should be expected of designers as well.

I would be happy if my designer gave me untitled layers. I usually have to use the magic wand to cut out layers from a flat picture myself. Very fun when there are gradients, drop shadows and similar stuff on a jpg-compressed image T_T In the end I'm essentially redoing all the work the designer did.

Sounds like a great guy to work with. Why do you?

> In my experience with designers, none of them care about things like that. You'll see 5 versions of PSDs filled with Untitled layers and no logical grouping.

Work with better designers :)

In all seriousness, I think many designers haven't be shown the benefits of why they should change their workflows. If you can demonstrate how using Git would make their jobs easier, you might get some converts.

Also, most designers think visually, so text-based commit history is kind of useless to them. I'd love to see tools like Timeline [http://pixelnovel.com/timeline], but for Git.

As for not naming & grouping layers? That's just a bad designer. Send them this: http://photoshopetiquette.com/

I worked pretty closely with a designer just recently. We went from throwing designs over the wall, to basic git based version control. We found that it was a pretty enjoyable workflow for the both of us. It allowed the designer to have more control over the end product, since he didn't need to ask me to update images.

We got to the point where he'd own all of the HTML and CSS, as long as I had certain ids and classes to hook my Javascript into. After we got CI and CD going, he's start pushing out new designs several times a day, giving us a pretty quick turn around time.

I never asked him to use the command line, since Tower handled most of the stuff he'd do. I wouldn't ask him to learn all of git, just as how I'd be frustrated if I had to learn all of Photoshop. I wouldn't be opposed to doing some basic work, like changing the color on the background layer.

For the record, I'm a designer, and do frontend coding.

I'm not advocating everyone to be a programmer, but to deliver the best experience, you need to be in control of the design. And I don't say you need to do frontend coding (even I think you should) but just to be part of the workflow, making your work better and everyone's else easier.

I taught my girlfriend to use git/github.com(how to commit, push and pull) in an afternoon, and she's not a coder or a designer. So I think quite easy to learn, specially if you have people around helping you if you get stuck.

It's like saying "I'm a designer, I cannot use email, IRC or Skype", when everyone else around you are using these tools.

> It doesn't work. If you've never used version control, "just learn git" can be a multi-week project. If you've never done design, "just learn photoshop" is the same.

Most of us have learned to use Photoshop to perform basic tasks without needing to push it all on the designer - things like resizing images, cropping, saving from source PSD to usable formats like JPG, etc.

It's hardly so much to ask of a designer to learn commit, push, and pull.

I strongly disagree: the designer is on the team and what she produces has to be integrated with the work of the other members of the team.

Git is just one tool to share work within a team, and it happens to have nice GUI (like SmartGit) which make it almost unnecessary to learn the Git command line. I cannot believe that someone who can use Photoshop is unable to learn to press "Pull", "Commit", and "Pull".

Maybe after every developer knows how to use git we can expect designers to learn it too. Until that point what you can expect from forcing someone to use a tool that is not central to their workflow is that they will use it as little as possible (if at all), and when it comes to source control, that's a bad thing.

If we programmers are so smart we'll make working "our" way easier, not harder.

On a team where Git is the source control mechanism, I do expect every developer to know how to use Git. And to a designer on that team, Git will be central to their workflow, assuming their workflow requires editing the site design.

If a developer needed to edit images regularly, I would expect them to learn enough Photoshop to do it, not to go bother a designer every time because Photoshop isn't a "developer tool".

For someone who can understand Photoshop layers, understanding commit, push, and pull shouldn't take too long!

There are guis for git. And in my experience teaching someone (in customer service) how to check in and check out files in an SCM takes about 20 minutes.

I both agree and disagree. Git in its simple use case can be pretty simple. If there's a programmer handy to fix things when merges get angry, or things like that, it can be as simple as dropping two scripts on the designer's desktop -- one to commit and push; one to pull.

> Why don't you learn photoshop and how to do basic design? That way you don't need to ask the designer to do minor tweaks.

I know you're trying to be facetious here, but I think it's actually a good idea. Why bother someone else to make a simple fix (I'm thinking typo-correction level here)?

I think that enra meant that git is a tool for people who are part of a team and modify files for the same project. Just like you know how to handle files and directories, you would know how this kind of tool works. But you are definitely right : the tool should be easy and quick to learn and understand.

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