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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

#31

Post by geosith »

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.

How would it work with the dynamic nature of content on the web?

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

#32

Post by jarrett »

mgkimsal wrote: post #22

"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 th…

> Compare with dozens of monitor and window sizes on desktops

In practice, I think many developers just choose a fixed with, e.g. 960px, and leave it at that. The desktop window size and DPI can be largely ignored at that point. Phones and tablets really did throw a wrench into that easy solution. But I can't complain, because users should have access to devices with smaller screens.

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

#33

Post by camus2 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #22

"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 th…

While it's a hassle to develop for various size phones

It's even easier if you adopt the mobile first approach,though it's not valid for every project,it's valid for most projects.Thinking mobile afterward is hard.

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

#34

Post by gexla »

Thank goodness. If designers don't need development help to bring this stuff to life, we can finally move on to bigger and better things. Hurry up! We can then focus more on building what Warren Buffet calls "moats" around our business so that people can't easily create "me too" competitors.

It's interesting this article mentions that development has just been getting more complex. I don't know that this trend will reverse, but good luck.

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

#35

Post by fragsworth »

This problem, taken more generally, is the question "What will come of us as we progress towards the singularity?"

Most of us assume every job will eventually be automated on some longterm time scale. This is based on the assumption is that all the hard AI problems will be solved.

The only argument to be had, then, is which of the jobs will be automated first? Design (Artistry), or Engineering? Many commenters here (as engineers, I assume) defend the longterm prospects of engineering. Let's try to break this problem down a bit.

If you want to automate the creation of art, which I assume is the capability to give a computer an input similar to "Design a good looking site", or "Make a pretty picture", then you need a computer that has knowledge of 1) computers, and 2) humans. If the computer doesn't understand humans as well as humans themselves do, then the art will be limited and there will be humans who can create better art.

If you want to automate Engineering, you need a computer that has knowledge of 1) computers, and 2) the language and communication required by artists. This seems at first glance not much different from solving the hardest AI problems, but the knowledge required is a small subset of total human knowledge, and it's possible that this is implemented first because of hardware limitations preventing us from solving true, complete human-knowledge AI.

We, as engineers, are putting ourselves out of jobs. We're making our jobs easier by creating better programming languages and automating as much of our own work as possible. There has to be a limit to this, after which we're no longer telling a computer lines of code, but instead speaking to it in natural language. Once this happens, we're no longer necessary. But I can see a future where the people telling the machines what to do are still valuable, though they will eventually be automated too.

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

#36

Post by palakchokshi »

"The design of a solution is much more important than its implementation under the covers, since the latter is almost always invisible to the user and can take on so many different permutations. Whether it’s a simple web page, a data-rich online newspaper, or a full-blown interactive application - how users experience it easily trumps the underlying code used to build it."

did you just say that how an application LOOKS is more important than how it is implemented? Ok not even worth talking about this anymore.... wish I could downvote...

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

#37

Post by jiggy2011 »

callmevlad wrote: post #28
jiggy2011 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't really enforce usability through tools , the best you can do is give people a more restrictive set of tools to work with. The more flexibility you have, the more power you give to screw it up.

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

#39

Post by callmevlad »

jarrett wrote: post #19

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 imp…

1. I think a good abstraction should make it clear what the underlying implementation is doing, and Webflow gives you access to the generated code if you need it. Sounds like a leaky abstraction, but aren't they all? ;)

2. Yes, they do now, but they won't always. For example, we're already working on an intuitive implementation of nested selectors. But I agree with you, things like pseudo-elements, complex selectors, etc are harder to move to the UI - but it's not impossible.

3. I agree with you to an extent, but consider this: the entire Webflow blog - including the JS interactions, working forms, etc - was built by my brother Sergie, a designer who doesn't code. There will always be ultra-custom components, but they don't make up the vast majority of web development.

4. See #3 on forms. And I think you'd be surprised by what you can do with content pulled from a database in a UI. We have something in the works, and honestly it has to be seen to be believed.

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

#40

Post by mgkimsal »

jarrett wrote: post #32
mgkimsal wrote: post #22

"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 th…

> Compare with dozens of monitor and window sizes on desktops In practice, I think many developers just choose a fixed with, e.g. 960px, and leave it at that. The desktop window size and DPI can be largely ignored at that point. Phones and tablets really did throw a wrench into that easy solution. But I can't complain, because users should have access to devices with smaller screens.

they didn't years ago. it's standardized some, but it was a nightmare 15 years ago. this "oh no there's so many devices!" is what I hear from people that never had to implement one site for IE3, NS2 and WebTV at the same time.
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