A designer I work with hands me AI files that I'm then meant to convert to a WordPress theme. She knows near zero about coding. It's a nightmare and I'm constantly in battle of functionality and her wanting things pixel perfect. The worst is that she hands over the designs to the clients who do not understand that it will not be pixel perfect and many things will change.
Hey, that's 90% of my business. At least it is an Ai file and you can pull SVGs out of it if that's your thing. You're right that it's no fun.
At some point, I decided that I'm okay with that battle (there's a lack folks who have both the skills and the masochistic willingness to do it, and I charge a relative lot for the service).
That said, I've been finding that a) designers who still really care about "pixel perfectness across devices" but don't know how to code usually aren't all that great (so I see fewer of them as move to better projects) and b) the ones that are really good also have an understanding about how the finished product should feel and will change across devices/screens sizes/etc (and what kinds of crap I might need to add because they have missed or omitted some functionality.
I've found it really helpful that the poorer designers can't think about the edge cases (or even to send a post archive or 404 page, in the case of WP sites), so I end up just doing whatever, and then iterating based on my own preferences... if they really don't like it, it's not my fault, they just send a design.
It's still all a pain in the ass, but at least I work remotely, for a few hours, and get paid okay... I just have to be okay with folks telling me to fix the "horrible looking mistakes" I did intentionally but which don't match their (non-obvious, often poorly thought-out) aesthetic bends.
Tell her to think of the robots. There are more robots that browse the web than humans, and her static design makes them angry. You are currently giving allegiance to robots over humans because the robots are estimated to become sentient in 2030.
Hopefully this will confuse her enough to stop asking for pixel perfect html/css.
Have you talked her through the challenges of your role and suggested to her (and any relevant management) that it might be worth you having a basic role along the way in encouraging things in the right direction?
