Do You Let Your Designers Loose on SharePoint?

There are many reasons why we believe that designers should work directly in SharePoint, with SharePoint designer:

• In all areas of .NET development, whether it be ASP.NET, WCF or SilverLight, designers are more and more involved with the actual project beyond mockups
• It helps them understand the limitations of SharePoint, which helps their future design to play to its strengths
• They are also better at CSS and DOM than a typical developer, as well as more cross-browser aware
• They are able to make a call on how close a designer can be bent when the implementation is hard or impossible - with developers who can't make that call, they may end up spending a lot of time failing to get the last 2 pixel perfect
• SharePoint designer is sufficiently powerful and offers the only experience currently available for building with SharePoint sites
• SharePoint has built-in check-in and check-out, as well as version controls, publishing and approval controls - all of which are excellent for team development

The major drawback for a designer is the complexity of a SharePoint masterpage:

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Figure: Bad - Nasty looking masterpage

Luckily, we always start with a clean-minimal masterpage, which gives our designers full freedom to implement their vision:

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Figure: Good - clean-minimal masterpage