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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

#51

Post by copergi »

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.

>In practice, I think many developers just choose a fixed with, e.g. 960px, and leave it at that

Yes, but they were wrong to do that then, and the world is better off now that mobile devices are forcing those people to do things less badly.

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

#52

Post by jarrett »

callmevlad wrote: post #44
jarrett wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

You're right, but I'm not arguing that programming can be automated as a whole. I'm saying that most rote tasks in web development (writing HTML/CSS, linking together various libraries, pushing code through processors, wiring up a basic UI to a database, etc) can be.

> writing HTML/CSS

That's never a rote process for me. Every bit of HTML or CSS I write requires human judgment. Any part that doesn't is handled for me by preprocessors.

I'm guessing that instead of "writing HTML/CSS," you'd have designers meticulously dragging objects and setting properties in a GUI. Isn't that just the same thing with another skin? If I have to click to set a property instead of typing the property in a text file, have I saved myself any work? Have I eliminated the need for some bit of technical knowledge?

> linking together various libraries

Concretely, what sorts of tasks does that entail? Generally there's a few moments to drop the files into the right folder, and a few more to add the appropriate tag(s) to the or the bottom of the bottom of the . How do you eliminate those steps? Or does the user still have to perform them, except in a GUI environment instead of a text editor? If the latter, then I'd argue the same as I did above about HTML and CSS.

Or do you include certain standard libraries by default? If so, that's fine, but the same is achieved in more traditional, text-based frameworks.

> pushing code through processors

Which processors do you have in mind? SCSS and Uglify are quite trivial to run. I wouldn't call that a pain point at all.

> wiring up a basic UI to a database

I'm still not convinced that can be automated beyond the basic interfaces that something like MS Access provides. Which don't cover most use cases. Can you give an example?

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

#53

Post by jarrett »

copergi wrote: post #51
jarrett wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>In practice, I think many developers just choose a fixed with, e.g. 960px, and leave it at that Yes, but they were wrong to do that then, and the world is better off now that mobile devices are forcing those people to do things less badly.

> they were wrong to do that then

Why was that wrong in a pre-mobile world? In many cases, using the entire width of the window would be a big mistake. For example, in a typical blog layout, you might have a main content column and a narrower sidebar column. If you expanded these to fill the entire width of the window, you could end up with lines of text that are, say, 1600 pixels wide. Which would be bad for usability and accessibility.[1]

[1]http://webaim.org/techniques/textlayout/#column_width

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

#54

Post by fjabre »

It's ironic that the very same types of people who are automating jobs away from the masses in all kinds of fields and industries would feel threatened by the point this article is trying to make. I love what webflow is trying to do and I really hope they accomplish it.

You're not special. You can be automated. I hope you are and I hope I am too. This is the future and I welcome it.

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

#55

Post by fragsworth »

altcognito wrote: post #13
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.

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

This is a common red herring in discussions about AI limitations. Computability theorems don't prevent computers from perform engineering tasks better than humans can.

Humans are under the same constraints of "cannot solve all computable problems" as computers are.

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

#56

Post by copergi »

jarrett wrote: post #53
copergi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In practice, I think many developers just choose a fixed with, e.g. 960px, and leave it at that Yes, but they were wrong to do that then, and the world is better off now that mobile devices are forcing those people to do things less badly.

> they were wrong to do that then Why was that wrong in a pre-mobile world? In many cases, using the entire width of the window would be a big mistake. For example, in a typical blog layout, you might have a main content column and a narrower sidebar column. If you expanded these to fill the entire width of the window, you could end up with lines of text that are, say, 1600 pixels wide. Which would be bad for usabili…

Because we already had tons of different display devices with tons of different sizes and resolutions. People just said "it works on my screen so that's good enough". You don't need to have text fill the entire width of the display to have a site work everywhere, I don't understand why you brought that up at all.

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

#57

Post by Executor »

I disagree with your vision of the next 25 years. Enterprises waste money creating new html templates for each web solution (as well as said developers). Imagine if all web pages had minimal layout design (with little or NO usage of images/css). That way developers can spend 100% of their time on the backend (business logic) - not on the front-end. Thus development time could decrease and features can increase. This is because front-end is a waste of time and if only we can culturally accept functional (think Google.com) not creative design, then no developers will rule the web.

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

#58

Post by punee »

palakchokshi wrote: post #36

"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 LOO…

Your quotation talks about design, not about looks. Huge difference.

Regardless, absolutely NO ONE who uses an application gives a shit about how it is implemented. All people see is the interface.

That may include elements that depend on implementation to make it responsive, but what matters is how it looks and feels to the user (i.e. fast). How that is achieved is irrelevant.

How it looks isn't "more important", it's the only thing that matters. All implementation changes are driven by design concerns.

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

#59

Post by voidr »

If the web will solely consist of static .jpegs then yes: designers will rule the web. However at the moment our webpages are interactive and starting to be adaptive and accessible as well. We also might have some data on the backend that need to be manipulated in the UI. And theres also performance. I don't think there is a way to expose all these to designers without requiring them to code and actually have an understanding beyond design.

> 3D artists have modeling and animation software that they can manipulate directly

And nowadays they also have to start worrying about the physical properties of those models.

Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw

It appears to me that this article generally doesn't want to understand the difference between print and web.

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

#60

Post by jarrett »

copergi wrote: post #56
jarrett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were wrong to do that then Why was that wrong in a pre-mobile world? In many cases, using the entire width of the window would be a big mistake. For example, in a typical blog layout, you might have a main content column and a narrower sidebar column. If you expanded these to fill the entire width of the window, you could end up with lines of text that are, say, 1600 pixels wide. Which would be bad for usabili…

Because we already had tons of different display devices with tons of different sizes and resolutions. People just said "it works on my screen so that's good enough". You don't need to have text fill the entire width of the display to have a site work everywhere, I don't understand why you brought that up at all.

> Because we already had tons of different display devices with tons of different sizes and resolutions.

What kinds of devices are you referring to? (Remember, we're talking about the days before mobile was a big enough market to justify making mobile versions of websites.)

Do you mean Blackberries? I'd humbly submit that, from a business perspective, Blackberry support wasn't an important goal for many sites.

Or do you mean laptops? There was a long time when mobile wasn't big and just about every laptop supported at least 960px.

> You don't need to have text fill the entire width of the display to have a site work everywhere, I don't understand why you brought that up at all.

I thought you were suggesting that the pre-mobile, 960px technique was bad for large screens. It sounds like I was mistaken, and you're actually referring to smaller screens.

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