Actually that's exactly the way they think. "These items should be aligned at their bottom ends", "this group of items should have space between them and take the whole width of the page" etc.
And some designers tools also let them express it in exactly that way.
Yeah, that's the engineer perspective on it. Focusing on the details, on deconstruction, and not on the whole.
It's true that rules such as "bottoms aligned" and "equal heights" exist frequently. And it's also true that there are tools to express these rules (align and arrange tools in Adobe software). However, those are the "implicit" parts, the minor details that one attends to while designing but without giving it much thought. Of course, for the technical guy who implements, those details are important. And that's why they're specified in design specs, so to speak.
But the layout, the major composition, is thought (typically) out of a grid system. And that's what, I believe, a designer focus on. Not on individual element rules, but on the whole.
Of course, if a engineer spends hours making a detail in the implementation look like the design, then he'll think that the designer gave it a proportional amount of attention. Typically, not true. :)
>But the layout, the major composition, is thought (typically) out of a grid system. And that's what, I believe, a designer focus on. Not on individual element rules, but on the whole.
That might be true for print designers of yore, but we've moved beyond that in the last 10 years or so.
Designers today know that it's not about some static composition on top of some grid. And they also know that individual elements are important (e.g. how a callout or a profile pic responds to a page resize).
Heck, it's the same designers that had to suffer using floats for layout (and if there was ever a "engineering driven idea" and at odds with grids it was that). Compared to that constraints is designer heaven!
Moved beyond grid systems? I can't agree with that.
Also, I don't really see the connection you're implying between using a grid and having a static composition or not considering individual elements behaviour. I do compose out of a grid system; the best designers (or the real designers) I worked with do the same. And that doesn't mean that we won't specify how the profile pic responds to resize - we do. It's just that it is a detail. It's not layout, it's not the composition. The specification of such details should not be the basis for your layout implementation framework.
>Moved beyond grid systems? I can't agree with that.
Good, because I haven't said so. I said we've moved beyond static designs on top of some grid.
When you add different screen sizes, resizing and interaction to the mix, the grid itself gets dynamic, and relationships between items (constrains) matter more than visual placement.
>It's just that it is a detail. It's not layout, it's not the composition.
The thing is that seems to me a relic of print design.
In modern UI design there's no fixed composition as such. Even whole elements might appear and disappear at will, based on the app's state.
And some designers tools also let them express it in exactly that way.