The difficulty of converting a Photoshop design to an actual UI reminds me of this passage from Paul Graham's essay "The Power of the Marginal" [1]:
> For example, it recently emerged that the famous glass artist Dale Chihuly hasn't actually blown glass for 27 years. He has assistants do the work for him. But one of the most valuable sources of ideas in the visual arts is the resistance of the medium. That's why oil paintings look so different from watercolors. In principle you could make any mark in any medium; in practice the medium steers you. And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop learning from this.
In the case of mobile app development, it's probably best to let the constraints and idioms of the platform, which the developer knows best, steer the design. So maybe part of the solution, contrary to what the article suggests, is to further collapse roles; maybe the developer should do the design, too.
> For example, it recently emerged that the famous glass artist Dale Chihuly hasn't actually blown glass for 27 years. He has assistants do the work for him. But one of the most valuable sources of ideas in the visual arts is the resistance of the medium. That's why oil paintings look so different from watercolors. In principle you could make any mark in any medium; in practice the medium steers you. And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop learning from this.
In the case of mobile app development, it's probably best to let the constraints and idioms of the platform, which the developer knows best, steer the design. So maybe part of the solution, contrary to what the article suggests, is to further collapse roles; maybe the developer should do the design, too.
[1]: http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html