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Easel (YC S12) launches as an easier way to design for the web in your browser

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Re: Easel (YC S12) launches as an easier way to design for the web in your browser

#11
post #9

Just tried it. Really cool. I have one question though. The option to right click and "Export HTML/CSS" only exports the current selected widget and not the entire grid/layout. That would be awesome if possible :)

I think that's intentional. The web doesn't need more fixed-size, absolutely-positioned-everything sites. Easel aims to be a design tool, I think, to help you in coding and designing sites, but won't do all of the former for you.

Exactly what we are thinking.

We realize that it's a difficult problem to create good markup but that doesn't mean we can't help. So we felt the best tradeoff was to give the CSS properties used so you can spend less time with the eyedropper tool.

There is an option to export the full page but we think it's best for quick prototypes.

Re: Easel (YC S12) launches as an easier way to design for the web in your browser

#13
post #5

Excited to see where this goes - the team is spot on that "The current web design process is broken. People use image editing tools for creation, share screenshots/flat exports over email, and spend more time than necessary manually translating the design into a working product." Certainly the future of application design should be with tools that understand the medium and the process.

> Certainly the future of application design should be with tools that understand the medium and the process.

This. The reason why web-design is very hard to abstract out into a Photoshop-like app is that because non-trivial websites are at their core, a fundamentally different medium than anything that Photoshop-familiar-designers are trained to create.

To treat the transition from visual-sketch to working-website as just some tedious code-work that gets in the way of brilliance and implementation is missing the point...the brilliance IS typically in the code that implements the vision in such a way that the site is maintainable and graceful across different platforms and screensizes.

Re: Easel (YC S12) launches as an easier way to design for the web in your browser

#16
post #9

Just tried it. Really cool. I have one question though. The option to right click and "Export HTML/CSS" only exports the current selected widget and not the entire grid/layout. That would be awesome if possible :)

File Menu > Generate All HTML/CSS

Re: Easel (YC S12) launches as an easier way to design for the web in your browser

#17
post #12

We've been using Easel to quickly prototype new designs for Vayable, and we're pretty happy with it. It's way more convenient to send around easel links than mucking with Photoshop files. Congrats to Easel! Keep going!

Thanks!

Re: Easel (YC S12) launches as an easier way to design for the web in your browser

#18
Getting the details right on individual CSS elements is one of things that always falls to the back of the priority queue. Easel seems like a fantastic option for quickly polishing up buttons, forms, etc, which adds up to a much better UI over time. Great job guys!

Re: Easel (YC S12) launches as an easier way to design for the web in your browser

#20

Getting the details right on individual CSS elements is one of things that always falls to the back of the priority queue. Easel seems like a fantastic option for quickly polishing up buttons, forms, etc, which adds up to a much better UI over time. Great job guys!

Thanks!
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