What design tools get wrong
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What design tools get wrong
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Re: What design tools get wrong
#2It seems that author advocates for design tools to become more and more like developer tools - a notion that I, as a developer, can totally get behind.
However, in my 12 years of experience in game development, many people who are world-class designers and artists don't have the same mental model as developers. There are a lot of "technical art" issues that in the end, you'd rather handle on a developer's side. I just don't think that a person who spends his time thinking about character's emotion, colour balance, human anatomy and other art-related issues is in the same mind space to think about technical issues like which UI containers should be scaled on what rules (full-screen or safe area? hugging the screen outside or inside?) for different screen sizes, how things should be composed from layers and animated, how assets can be converted from a static image to a resizable one, how a giant image can be cut into a 9-slice (or in a more complicated way) to save texture budget, how can we reuse already existing assets without importing another image that is very, very similar, how different kind of gradients behave with not-pixel-perfect scaling and crunch compression (and I didn't even go into 3d!). I tried empowering designers and artists so they would make these decisions, but they hated it and were miserable - so in the end I'd rather get a static, single-sized PSD and do all that work myself.
All of this, of course, are just my 2 cents from a specific industry and with a very specific kind of people in mind - I'm not trying to impose these views on any designers and artists who want to get into the technical art side and would be thrilled to see more and more individuals who can be productive and happy in this kind of hybrid role. But as a matter of fact, these people are very, very rare and we shouldn't expect most artists to be like that.
Re: What design tools get wrong
#3It seems that author advocates for design tools to become more and more like developer tools - a notion that I, as a developer, can totally get behind. However, in my 12 years of experience in game development, many people who are world-class designers and artists don't have the same mental model as developers. There are a lot of "technical art" issues that in the end, you'd rather handle on a developer's side. I jus…
I think you're right, but I think the motivation for a lot of posts like this are rooted in developers working with designers who believe "issues like which UI containers should be scaled on what rules (full-screen or safe area? hugging the screen outside or inside?) for different screen sizes" should be within their domain of influence.
That separation of responsibilities is always a tough line to define in reality, and I do agree that the tools used by whomever is assuming that role should become more like developer tools.
Re: What design tools get wrong
#4I could nitpick the authors points, but honestly this article just boils down to "Design tools need more features!" which I generally agree with. We're living in nice times for design tools though - Figma/Sketch are leading the pack and moving extremely fast.
We're no longer in the dark ages of waiting 5+ years for Adobe to implement some basic feature (like being able to round corners on a rectangle). Well, I guess if you're for some reason using xD you're still waiting a comically long amount of time between significant releases, but that's your own fault.
Re: What design tools get wrong
#5Sounds like the author wants his tools to be as fully featured as the code that will embody the resultant design. In that case I would recommend learning more code instead of relying on a proxy that will never be as flexible.
The best designers I’ve worked with not only understand their own domain but the possibilities and limitations of how it will be executed, because they are also developers.
Re: What design tools get wrong
#6I worked at an agency with designers. We (web developers) convinced the designers to use Sketch for the stuff that they did for us. It saved us a ton of time over receiving Photoshop and Illustrator files to work with (the traditional "design tools").
Sure, things could be improved, but I love that we have Sketch and Figma now.
Re: What design tools get wrong
#7Sounds like the author wants his tools to be as fully featured as the code that will embody the resultant design. In that case I would recommend learning more code instead of relying on a proxy that will never be as flexible. The best designers I’ve worked with not only understand their own domain but the possibilities and limitations of how it will be executed, because they are also developers.
A little background: you are more or less describing the author of the blog post!
That’s the interesting thing about being a coder who designs, the tooling on both sides always lets you down at least a little. Having that wider context is worth the disappointment, I think.
Re: What design tools get wrong
#8Sounds like the author wants his tools to be as fully featured as the code that will embody the resultant design. In that case I would recommend learning more code instead of relying on a proxy that will never be as flexible. The best designers I’ve worked with not only understand their own domain but the possibilities and limitations of how it will be executed, because they are also developers.
Basically this. It's mind boggling to think a designer could ever excel without knowing how to work with the medium they're designing for.
One of the fundamentals of art school is learning how to work with the characteristics of your medium.
Re: What design tools get wrong
#9I could nitpick the authors points, but honestly this article just boils down to "Design tools need more features!" which I generally agree with. We're living in nice times for design tools though - Figma/Sketch are leading the pack and moving extremely fast. We're no longer in the dark ages of waiting 5+ years for Adobe to implement some basic feature (like being able to round corners on a rectangle). Well, I guess…
Well a lot of people don't know how to use Figma properly and still are exporting css with absolute positioned items so there's certainly a need for courses on Figma its a very deep tool but its not going to give usable results by default.
Re: What design tools get wrong
#10Sounds like the author wants his tools to be as fully featured as the code that will embody the resultant design. In that case I would recommend learning more code instead of relying on a proxy that will never be as flexible. The best designers I’ve worked with not only understand their own domain but the possibilities and limitations of how it will be executed, because they are also developers.
While it's good to know how the sausage is made this doesn't solve the issue. They want portable formats for common features. Learning a single tech stack doesn't accomplish this.