You know, I’ll take a few minutes off from working and just take some time to mention how incompetent the external design firm we’ve contracted at is. I’ll say that I was actually pleasantly surprised by the quality of the HTML/CSS code delivered to us. It’s pretty good, and one of the few things they’ve delivered that I’ve been happy with. Surprisingly (for such an established firm) it’s been the visual design that’s been supremely lacking. Things like missed deadlines have been pretty bad (we’re talking about several months of slippage with constant promised (and missed) deliveries), but the amount of bad design is just inexcusable. A style guide that was promised has yet to be created, and it’s obvious from what we’ve gotten, both in terms of design comps and even final code, that there has been little thought given to design consistency. As late as 2 weeks ago, new visual elements were being introduced, and there was no stable visual language as far as line widths, font sizes, color, etc. When they delivered two of their ‘final’ templates earlier this month, there were entirely new elements that we had never even seen before, much less approved.
What spurred me to take the time to write though is that while I’ve been working on these things pretty heavily the past few weeks, I just noticed that the colors in the CSS files are completely different shades than in the HTML of the templates. I have no idea what kind of crack they’ve been smoking over there, but I’m sure it’s some good shit.