Collaboration with graphic designers/web developers on Perspective

My client has floated the idea of having a graphic designer/web developer get involved with the development of a few perspective views, because, well, engineers aren’t exactly known for their aesthetic flair :wink:

The system that we’re currently developing, they’re controlling off an iPad Pro, and they will be taking it around to a few trade shows to try and wow some potential customers. So they just want a few screens that look absolutely a million bucks and have a look and feel that ties in with the branding design work they’ve already had done for their website and so on.

Now, I have very little experience in web development, and most web developers will have no experience in SCADA systems. So both of us are going to be on the back foot to some degree. But just so I can tell my client whether or not that’s a viable option: if I had an experienced graphic designer/web developer on side, how could I utilise their skill set in developing the views? Could they design a view with HTML and then have me import it into Designer and attach functions to all the buttons? Could they give me style sheets which I could import and assign to components? What else could we do here?

They could provide style sheets, but you would need to place them at a level which would affect ALL Perspective projects on the Gateway.

They could easily use a secondary Designer to design Styles classes while you develop the HMI screens, but you’re going to run into a barrier of sorts; Perspective is designed from the ground up to hold your hand and make Views easy to design by doing a lot of the “Page” layout and design heavy-lifting for you, and we do NOT expose any way to manipulate Components/Containers/Popups/DockedViews outside of what you see in the Designer.

So consider a basic Button… We provide hundreds of options for styling and resizing and positioning and function, but a web-developer is going to see that they have no say in how the actual HTML for the button is constructed, and they will probably be turned-off, because they’re limited in what they can manipulate.

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Thanks, I thought that might be the case. Is that the sort of thing that might be possible in the (possibly distant) future, or would that be a complete overhaul of how perspective works? I’m assuming the latter.

I somewhat disagree. I have some of our web devs here looking at Perspective and they are happy to work to provide style sheets and base style classes. The Perspective themes lays some basic groundwork. Additionally now that Ignition uses file based storage, code can be pushed around using something like git that most devs already use. Yes there is a learning curve and the web devs may need to use the designer a bit, but there is plenty they can help with and customize to guide engineering in the right direction.

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Oh, absolutely. I meant more that web developers might prefer to inject a <label> or <span> element into a button to allow for fine-tuning their stylings, but they would be unable to with Perspective. I wouldn’t expect that we would allow that long-term.

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