A design review is a fundamental part of any designer or developers daily work life. You work on something, you get it reviewed, you make some changes, repeat, repeat, repeat. There are times that you probably spend more time in some sort of review than you do actually building things.

On my first day working at OrgSync five years ago I brought a Ruby on Rails book with me … and the developers chuckled, saying it wasn’t worth the time. As a just-out-of-college web designer without any production-level app experience — they thought I wasn’t going to ever be an integral part of the code side of things. Over the last five years no one’s pushed more code to master than this lowly designer has. Here’s a few things I’ve learned about working as a designer on the development team: