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It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

blog.webflow.com

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

#21

Post by stdbrouw »

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.

But would people really like it? There's a 20-year history of people trying to make the web look pretty (splash pages, flash, fancy-schmancy javascript transitions etc.) and people hating them for it. There's something to be said for bland uniformity when what you really care about is the information, not what it looks like.

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

#22

Post by mgkimsal »

"If that wasn’t enough, the explosion of smart phones and tablets has made the job of the web designer even harder. Designers can no longer assume a fixed-width canvas..."

They never should have, and I'd say it's probably easier in some respects with smartphones because, while there's a multitude, they're all fixed, and you can generally target, say, 3-6, and cover a huge variety. And people generally can't change their font sizes.

Compare with dozens of monitor and window sizes on desktops. 13, 15, 19, 20+, with varying types of DPI and available fonts on systems. Not so much monitor sizes I mean, but... is the browser window full screen, or partial? People resizing windows would lose info, or not see it in the first place, and get lost. Back in the early days the "256-color palette" was considered a requirement for many projects.

While it's a hassle to develop for various size phones, it's still a more controlled and uniform set of sizes, imo; it just takes a lot more work.

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

#23

Post by jarrett »

callmevlad wrote: post #17
marcosdumay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Historically, some tasks have proven easier to automate than others. Much of typesetting and printing was rote, thus it was automated fairly early in the history of computers.

There have been efforts to automate programming, but so far it has proven impossible. That's because programming is almost never rote. It's likely that automating programming is tantamount to inventing a true artificial intelligence. If that happens, the implications extend far, far beyond web design tools.

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

#24

Post by xophe »

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.

1) web design is an engineering discipline because you have to make things fast and fault-tolerant on top of making it look good. there's a lot more moving parts to a website than there is to an InDesign export.

2) any tool sufficiently powerful to render complex websites will make it considerably easier to create simple bland websites

3) the mythical oracle described above would not only be of interest to webdesign, but all of computer engineering. i wish you the best of luck.

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

#25

Post by jiggy2011 »

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.

But magazine designers don't have to care about usability to the same extent. Once people have to interact with your stuff consistency becomes important.

Back when Flash was in vogue there was all kinds of print designers using it to produce very creative websites. But the consensus was that people hated them.

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

#26

Post by palakchokshi »

callmevlad wrote: post #11
palakchokshi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Ok let's look at some of the use cases you mentioned.

Wire up form submission: Submitting a form in just HTML requires setting the action attribute to point to a backend that will accept the form and do something with it. Wiring it up does not require knowledge of code, it requires knowledge of knowing where to post that form to. What kind of automation do you envision here?

Writing Javascript to get navigation bar working: Lots of widgets/controls exist with javascript based behavior enclosed with the UI(they even have extension points via properties that can change how the control behaves by setting properties e.g. slide left slowly, slide up with a bounce, etc). If you need your navigation bar to behave in a custom way there is no way around writing javascript to implement your custom behavior.

Setting up MySQL server to get dynamic content on the page: Unless you want to put MySQL connection code directly in the frontend(not recommended) you will have to write some code to get the data from the backend.

Now if your goal is to move away from hand-coding simple applications and Wordpress templates for creating simple Websites then the Title of your blog post is a tad exaggerated at best and a bit of link baiting at worst.

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

#27

Post by jarrett »

kkilat wrote: post #14
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Today we have such powerful tools for web development that, at least for me, there is hardly any "meaningless and repetitive work" involved. Those aspects of the job have been automated. For example, I use SCSS instead of pure CSS, eliminating whole classes of drudgery. I use Rails' form_for instead of manually populating text fields with their current values. Another class of drudgery eliminated.

What's left is still coding, without the repetitive parts. Instead of going on vacation, I take the extra time to produce more and better software.

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

#28

Post by callmevlad »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #25
callmevlad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But magazine designers don't have to care about usability to the same extent. Once people have to interact with your stuff consistency becomes important. Back when Flash was in vogue there was all kinds of print designers using it to produce very creative websites. But the consensus was that people hated them.

Yes, I agree, and web design tools should enforce/encourage good usability. Good usability doesn't have to be tied to software or code.

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

#29

Post by camus2 »

Ok,guy selling a wysiwyg , webflow , "drag and drop with no code".

OP, doesnt understand that, these webbased products DONT WORK.

Even during the flash area,designers needed basic coding knowledge to add listeners to events, and, the twist is , some designers became coders because they had to , in order to stay competitive on the flash job market.

Web designers WILL always need to learn to code if they want to stay competitive ,period.

Things change fast on the web,and wysiwyg web tools cant integrate all the latest web techs, all the latest best practices,etc...

Finally, web designers dont work in the void,they work in teams with coders, and coders hate wysiwyg generated code.

So no ,not going to happen,like it did not happen with Dreamweaver (that even tries to be less designer oriented and more code oriented now).

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

#30

Post by mgkimsal »

"The next 25 years of the web will be all about design. We can make significantly more progress by opening up the power of web development to the masses."

No, the next 25 years will be about mobile, and whatever that evolves in to. More specifically, it'll be about using whatever hardware manufacturers give developers access to. How design plays in to that will be tied to the same constraints that development is tied to.

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