Giving coders the PSD

Originally Posted by Bennett I'm in the middle on this. In one sense, a coder is requiring an additional risk to the purchaser due to them wanting easier work.

To me it has nothing to do with easier work, it's about quality work. I can't always re-create things in photoshop as well as the designer could, I don't always know what they want, and when it saves me time, it saves the designer money.

Originally Posted by jjmac To me it has nothing to do with easier work, it's about quality work. I can't always re-create things in photoshop as well as the designer could, I don't always know what they want, and when it saves me time, it saves the designer money.

I simply commented off what others have posted previous to me on reasonings of why they like to have the source. Looking at my own personal work, as well as when I code my own work, I rarely require anything that would be needed from the source. Then again, my designs are usually created with ease of coding in mind. Perhaps the source is not required if proper flat files are given?


Personally I just can't see how it's an excuse to want the source simply because you can't tell 14pt Arial from 18pt Verdana.

As to Salathe's comment: With the growing ammount of work given over the internet, as well as the discounted services that alot of htmlers charge now days, contracts are usually more hassel than a benefit in smaller projects.

Originally Posted by Bennett Looking at my own personal work, as well as when I code my own work, I rarely require anything that would be needed from the source. Then again, my designs are usually created with ease of coding in mind. Perhaps the source is not required if proper flat files are given?

That's a big difference. None of the clients I work with do html coding (so far anyway) they are design professionals. They design without coding limits in mind.

I agree with you partially though. In my own personal projects, I could really care less if the font size is a bit off or the wrong font as long as the serif (or lack thereof) matched. However when I code for a client I aim for highest quality and a lot of times I will take a screen shot of the final product and superimpose it over the original .psd to show how close it matches. If they designed something, they did it for a reason and it's my job to reproduce it as accurately as possible into a web page.

It's not only the font size I pay attention to. It's the kerning, the leading, the line height, everything to do with the font to render it exactly as the designer has designed it. It's a pain to manually figure all of those out for every section of text without the .psd. Then there's the issue of rollovers and shadows.

If they don't want to give me the .psd (and I've had a few) that's fine I just let them know up front some of the problems they could run in to and not to expect a 100% exact match. But I have a long working relationship with most of my clients so this is rarely an issue.