Design Meets Development: The Crucial Role of Styling in Startup Success
It’s easy for things to get lost in translation. We learn this as kids when we play the telephone game – where a sentence is whispered from one person to another. In the course of the game, either because we misheard something or felt like we could make it more concise and still get the same message across, the original idea turns into something else entirely. This is just as true in Product Development: you need to look no further than LinkedIn to find countless posts where designers wonder how the creations they put so much thought and consideration into come to life in a… severely mutated form.
Even if the product will inevitably evolve due to the iterative nature of digital product design, its success will always hinge upon well-designed – and well-implemented – features. Still, this is just one of the situations that has led to the age-old clash between designers and developers. While both are vital for creating a digital product, they often think and communicate very differently.
Some tools look to minimise the misalignment between UX and Development teams (Figma and Zeplin, to name a few) – but they can only go so far. A new role has arisen as a natural response to this necessity. At Altar we call it the Front-End Styling Developer, though the titles can range from Creative Front-End Developer to UI Developer.
Being one of the first Altarions on the Styling team, I’ve been privileged to learn from the best of the best. Not only do I get to work directly with our VP of Front-End, but I also have the opportunity to develop my knowledge with all the departments that form Altar’s ecosystem – a team that’s helped successfully bring over 80 products to life.
In fact, each member of the Styling team has a background in both Development and Design, uniquely qualifying us to understand the user experience implications of each visual element and what is necessary for a well-crafted technical execution.
The last thing you want is to invest time and money in a design, go through multiple rounds of iterations to achieve the look and feel you want and that will make your users happy, and then pay for an implementation that turns out to look nothing like it.
Styling is what ensures that doesn’t happen, and ensures you get an interface that looks exactly the way you asked for. In practical terms, Styling involves setting up the layout structure, creating all the components, and guaranteeing everything looks and (visually) behaves as intended.