A design handoff developers won't hate

Ask a developer about the worst handoff they've received and you'll hear the same story: beautiful mockups, three breakpoints, and total silence about everything in between. We build our handoff package around a simple test — five questions the developer should never have to ask. If the package answers all five, it ships.

Question one: "What happens between these two breakpoints?"

Mockups show 375px, 768px, and 1440px. Real browsers show everything in between. For every component that changes shape, the handoff names the exact breakpoint where it changes and what drives it — container width, not device name. Our own designer and developer sit together for this pass, which is how the Solstice packaging problem got caught in a different project's context: some things only surface when two disciplines look at the same screen.

Question two: "What does this look like empty, loading, or overflowing?"

Every list gets an empty state, every async block gets a loading treatment, and every text container gets an answer to "what if the client writes a headline twice this long?" These states are boring to design and expensive to improvise — so they're designed, not improvised.

Question three: "Which of these values are tokens?"

The package ships a token sheet — named colors, the spacing scale, type styles, radii, shadows — and the mockups reference token names, not raw hex values. When a value in a mockup doesn't match a token, the handoff says whether that's intentional or a mistake to normalize. This single habit eliminates most of the "is this #4A4658 or #4B4759?" archaeology.

Questions four and five: interaction and priority

Four: "What does this do when I hover, focus, tap, or tab to it?" — answered with a states table per interactive component, keyboard focus included. Five: "If I run out of time, what's negotiable?" — answered with a priority marker on every screen: launch-blocking, launch-week, or post-launch. Developers plan honestly when the design tells them what actually matters.

The full package — annotated mockups, token sheet, states tables, and an editable component library — is the standard closing deliverable of our web design and build service, whether we build the site or your team does.