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It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

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Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#11

Post by callmevlad »

palakchokshi wrote: post #8
callmevlad wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that we should get rid of code altogether, that is an impossible task. I'm saying that we shouldn't require code for things that can be automated, and there sure are tons of parts of web development that can be.

Don't widgets, controls, etc. do just that? As you mention they are just parts and to create complex applications you still have to consider business logic, data access, third party API integration(if needed), interaction logic, navigation logic, etc. You are looking at this strictly from a web designer's point of view, which is understandable since you are one, however creating applications is much more complex and…

Yes and no. We're starting with solving for web designers, and the vast majority of their work comes nowhere near the complexity of full-blown applications. The fact that a designer has to know how wire up a form submission, or have to write JavaScript just to get a navigation bar working, or worry about setting up a MySQL server just to get some dynamic content on the page seems broken. It feels like what blogging used to be in the 90s - code HTML and push via FTP. But we've moved past that, and I know we can move past hand-coding HTML/CSS/Wordpress when creating dynamic websites and simple applications (of which many are glorified CRUD form wrappers).

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#13

Post by altcognito »

nathas wrote: post #10

> "Unlike many technical disciplines, design is impossible to automate" I disagree. You have design-as-a-service with things like 99designs.com, you have great templates with WordPress, you have Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks that get you 90% of the way there (works on different form factors automagically, lots of flexibility), you have style guides for native iOS and Android apps... You don't "automate" design,…

> Design seems a lot easier to get 90% of the way there than get code to a point where programmers are less needed.

Not to mention, the last time I checked, we hadn't solved all computable problems, nor will we in any future timeframe.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#14

Post by kkilat »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #4
callmevlad wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that we should get rid of code altogether, that is an impossible task. I'm saying that we shouldn't require code for things that can be automated, and there sure are tons of parts of web development that can be.

The truth is that programmers have been trying to automate themselves since the beginning of the trade. Garbage collection, higher order functions, automated deployment tools, wordpress, they are all related. We are lazy, we don't like doing meaningless repetitive stuff that somehow nonetheless requires programming experience. As far as I can tell, lowering the cost of implementing software hasn't put a dent in the d…

I agree, I don't think this is about eliminating programming "jobs" at all. It's really about eliminating the "meaningless repetitive work" you mentioned. In that way it could actually be freeing to developers -- allowing you to focus more of your time and energy on the really innovative things that CAN'T be automated.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#15

Post by marcosdumay »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #2

"If the web is to reach its full potential, we have to empower many more people, with fewer technical boundaries. The needs and capabilities of the internet will grow faster than society can train up new computer programmers, so we have no choice but to transcend past programming to interact with this beautiful new medium." I couldn't make my job go away if I wanted it to. You don't just say, oh, this problem is too…

Exactly. TLDR From the article: Developers must automate their work, and once they do that, designers will be more relevant than they.

An entire article of wishfull thinking.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#16

Post by callmevlad »

nathas wrote: post #10

> "Unlike many technical disciplines, design is impossible to automate" I disagree. You have design-as-a-service with things like 99designs.com, you have great templates with WordPress, you have Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks that get you 90% of the way there (works on different form factors automagically, lots of flexibility), you have style guides for native iOS and Android apps... You don't "automate" design,…

Consider the diversity of design we see in printed magazines, and the lack of diversity on the web. That's not really automating design, it's making it bland and uniform. Imagine if web designers had a tool like InDesign, and it actually worked by generating the right code - I personally think that would be extremely liberating to designers.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#17

Post by callmevlad »

marcosdumay wrote: post #15
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #2

"If the web is to reach its full potential, we have to empower many more people, with fewer technical boundaries. The needs and capabilities of the internet will grow faster than society can train up new computer programmers, so we have no choice but to transcend past programming to interact with this beautiful new medium." I couldn't make my job go away if I wanted it to. You don't just say, oh, this problem is too…

Exactly. TLDR From the article: Developers must automate their work, and once they do that, designers will be more relevant than they. An entire article of wishfull thinking.

Pessimism aside, isn't that exactly what happened with desktop publishing software? The work of manual typesetters, etc was automated, and print designers became a lot more relevant.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#18

Post by [deleted] »

callmevlad wrote: post #16
nathas wrote: post #10

> "Unlike many technical disciplines, design is impossible to automate" I disagree. You have design-as-a-service with things like 99designs.com, you have great templates with WordPress, you have Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks that get you 90% of the way there (works on different form factors automagically, lots of flexibility), you have style guides for native iOS and Android apps... You don't "automate" design,…

Consider the diversity of design we see in printed magazines, and the lack of diversity on the web. That's not really automating design, it's making it bland and uniform. Imagine if web designers had a tool like InDesign, and it actually worked by generating the right code - I personally think that would be extremely liberating to designers.

[deleted]

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#19

Post by jarrett »

I don't believe there is a major leap to be made. Here's why.

There have always been visual editors for the web. As the author suggests, they have relied on abstractions of the underlying code. For example, the CSS box model (width/height, padding, border, margin) are often abstracted as draggable handles on bounding boxes. Yet these systems suffer from some fundamental limitations:

1. They obscure the underlying implementation, making it harder for designers to understand and fix problems when they inevitably occur. On a related note, the lack of visibility into the code inhibits learning.

2. They lack the power to express more advanced styling rules, such as the following:

  /* Paragraphs have 20px margin above unless they follow a heading */
  p {margin: 20px 0;}
  h1 + p {margin-top: 0;}
  
  /* Don't indent the top-level UL, but indent 20px for each level of nesting */
  ul {margin: 0;}
  ul ul {margin: 0 0 0 20px;}
  
  /* Divs that are immediate children of forms get 20px margins, but divs nested
  within those don't. */
  form > div {margin: 20px 0;}
Or, if they do have the power to express those rules, they're doing so in one of two ways: Letting you write CSS ad-hoc, or building a complex GUI that maps to those CSS rules. In the former case, you're back to hand-coding. In the latter case, you're using a clunkier proxy for hand-coding.

3. They lack the power to express idiosyncratic JavaScript interactions. They can provide some generic primitives like rollouts. But many, many real-world apps need fine-grained control over interaction. For example, today I built a system of nested lists with sorting, deletion, and insertion to arbitrary depth. It was so idiosyncratic that it couldn't have possibly been made into a generic component in a visual editor. Problems of that nature are fairly common in my work. And no, the idiosyncrasy is not a sign that something's wrong: Different problem domains often call for (slightly) different interfaces.

4. They don't play very well with dynamic websites. If you need forms or for HTML to be generated from a database--both of which are very common needs--you can't express that generically in a visual editor. Expressing that kind of logic is an act of programming. Historically, efforts to abstract programming into a visual process have been disappointing or outright failures. Source code is the only workable way to express a computer program.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#20

Post by jarrett »

callmevlad wrote: post #16
nathas wrote: post #10

> "Unlike many technical disciplines, design is impossible to automate" I disagree. You have design-as-a-service with things like 99designs.com, you have great templates with WordPress, you have Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks that get you 90% of the way there (works on different form factors automagically, lots of flexibility), you have style guides for native iOS and Android apps... You don't "automate" design,…

Consider the diversity of design we see in printed magazines, and the lack of diversity on the web. That's not really automating design, it's making it bland and uniform. Imagine if web designers had a tool like InDesign, and it actually worked by generating the right code - I personally think that would be extremely liberating to designers.

It's very, very common for web designers to do their creative work in Photoshop or Illustrator. Then, they either code it themselves or hand the PDF/AI to a coder. So I don't believe the supposed blandness of the web results from a lack of visual design tools.
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