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It's only one tip, but if both developers and designers are in color-calibrated environments with color-accurate monitors, you can eliminate some it-looks-good-on-my-screen arguments with technology (colorimeters). Many developers that are working pretty close with designers are using really bad, not-calibrated panels and aren't seeing the same thing as the person giving them the design.


How useful is this in practice though?

I'd guess that far greater than 99% of the people using (most) products do not have perfectly color calibrated monitors. If it doesn't look good on the developer's "kinda close" monitors, that seems like a decent indication that the design needs to be updated to allow for "rougher tolerances" so to speak.


> 99% of the people using (most) products do not have perfectly color calibrated monitors

I think I would disagree. And I'd disagree on the grounds that a large swath of users mostly use a tablet or smart phone. These devices do tend to have wide color gamut and pretty good color accuracy. A lot of mid-tier and gaming laptops and monitors purely focus FPS and these are the devices coders are often coding on (obviously there are exceptions, especially anyone using an Apple device, but other OEMs too like ASUS who has been putting out 100% DCI-P3, Pantone-validated OLED panels on even mid-range laptops).

Calibration, part II, is important too. Having calibrated monitors for friends that were lower-end, they remark on how big the difference is for them, meaning calibration is still valuable even if the monitor itself wasn't of good quality.

A monitor is an important part of IO and aside from aspect ratio and resolution, developers don't tend to care about the other specs of the monitors. A good calibrated monitor would be like using the same code formatter--everyone is on the same page at least about a specific category potential issues. By eliminating color as a factor, you can now focus on having different arguments.


> you can eliminate some it-looks-good-on-my-screen arguments

If a designer exports their design in something like figma, sketch, or xd, where the developer can access the css values for the colors, then why would it matter how it looks on the developer's machine?


If you don't treat design as a collaborative exercise, then I suppose it doesn't matter.


I've lived in both the graphic design and engineering world and this is true. Most computer screens are way off in terms of color accuracy and it can result in wildly different results depending on what computer you are using. Viewing angle also has a huge effect on some screens - particularly the cheap ones.




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