I'm trying to understand what Collaboration means to Designers/Visual Designers/Graphic Designers? Deliberately keeping it vague to get multiple perspectives.

Completely agree (Graham?) - this is a constant in eLearning. Instructional Designers should absorb the learning content and structure/storyboard the content in a not-only instructional manner, but propose interactivity options to help learn/reinforce concepts, processes, etc.

Then they should discuss their ideas with the developers to see what is actually possible. The developers should think through the ideas IDs have and, if there are programmatic/tool limitations, propose alternatives.

Frankly, I appreciate it when an ID has some grand idea that would be great learning interaction. It may need to be revised (and likely toned-down) to be possible and built, especially within timeframes, but I like those sorts of ideas - who knows what may actually be possible with rapid tech advances...

So to the point - collaboration in my eLearning world means instructional designers working with subject experts to define the learning material, then the instructional designers working with the developers and graphic designers to bring that material 'to life' in an online environment.

a headache... I'm a coder so design people bring me all kinds of BS issues then the boss wants  "collaboration" i.e, I tell them no in such a way that doesn't upset them and they go ahead and try to make their BS anyway because nobody told them not too.

My interpretation of the word collaboration is that "people work together to make a product".

I'm old and what used to be done in graphic ad agencies (still ads to sell products in magazines or brochures) has changed a lot technically. What used to be done with cameras and film is now done on computers digitally. Some of the graphic ad agencies had their own 'copy writers' ( people who make up the words to sell something ). They all had 'art directors' ( people who do the compositions (Comps)) and illustrators and access to pro photographers to shoot product shots, etc.

They also had access to ( or their own) typesetters and STATS ( a stat is where you take copy and reduce it or enlarge it OR make a proof of a final product on film.

All these people worked together to make the product ( in this case the final product from graphic agency would go to a "printer" on behalf of the client ( to the magazine or a printer who is hired to do a brochure, etc. )

That's probably a good overall start re: that old way of working.