Design Perfectionism
A question was recently asked on Tavern: "Why isn't pixel perfection dead?"
Perfectionism in design is something I think (and soapbox) about often, so I answered. That answer was voted up as the top answer, so maybe it's worth sharing here.
Is pixel perfection dead? Maybe not "pixel perfection", but that's not to say that perfection itself is "dead." Nor should it be.
Unfortunately the opposition to "pixel perfection" has also come to mean, incorrectly, that things we build don't need to look as good as their designs. The development process should work like a fabricator, not a meat grinder. And as designers, we have an obligation to know and work within the limitations of the browser or native platform we're designing for. If we do that then there is no excuse, other than lack of skill or sheer laziness, for building things that are less then perfect. Do the pixels themselves need to land within 1px of where they are in that Photoshop mockup? Of course not. But the build shouldn't be half-assed either. If a developer shows me a "finished" build that is missing all sorts of details, I won't accept some line about pixel perfection being dead. I tell them to go that last mile, and that "90% done" is not actually "done".
So is pixel perfection an outdated concept? Probably. Just don't use, or accept it being used, as a crutch for skipping details and cutting corners. To expand on that, this applies to designers as well, not just developers:
I've seen it ("it" meaning, the use of "pixel perfection is dead" as an excuse to cut corners) from designers as well. When I see designers do it, it's often in the form of unfinished/unpolished designs. That is sometimes a design with shoddy alignments—two containers that are supposed to be of equal height that have been just eyballed and don't look right. Or type that has been slapped on the design rather than placed with care. In that scenario, the excuse is usually that these shortfalls will "be fixed during build." Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. When designing something from which developers will need to extract image assets (like a web page or native app), that sloppiness just makes more work for everyone. There are certainly times when a less than polished design is okay. It's not always okay, and the thing I try to teach designers (and developers too) is that precision and details matter. To do it right the first time, every time.
