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What design tools get wrong

kilianvalkhof.com

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Re: What design tools get wrong

#11

Post by jdhn »

phaedryx wrote: post #6

I worked at an agency with designers. We (web developers) convinced the designers to use Sketch for the stuff that they did for us. It saved us a ton of time over receiving Photoshop and Illustrator files to work with (the traditional "design tools"). Sure, things could be improved, but I love that we have Sketch and Figma now.

I've found that agencies are behind the times when it comes to design tools. I once exported a screen of a mobile UI from Sketch as a PDF, only to be told "When I opened it in Photoshop, it was one flat layer. Can you send over your original Photoshop file?" I told them that the original was made in Sketch, and that was the last I heard from them.

Re: What design tools get wrong

#13

Post by nkrisc »

golergka wrote: post #2

It seems that author advocates for design tools to become more and more like developer tools - a notion that I, as a developer, can totally get behind. However, in my 12 years of experience in game development, many people who are world-class designers and artists don't have the same mental model as developers. There are a lot of "technical art" issues that in the end, you'd rather handle on a developer's side. I jus…

I see where you're coming from but I disagree on a few points. I work as a UX designer, designing web UI. I should understand and consider how the design will flex when the browser is resized (and understand what's possible). I have a good understanding of what will be trivial to implement versus what will require an extra week of development for little gain. I need to understand how the web works so I can think about how the site will work on a bad connection, how it will work when the request times out, how the data that powers the site is shaped and the implications of that.

The web is my medium and how can I effectively design for the entire experience (not just how it looks) if I don't understand how the web fundamentally works?

Re: What design tools get wrong

#14

Post by davidivadavid »

pcmaffey wrote: post #8
doitLP wrote: post #5

Sounds like the author wants his tools to be as fully featured as the code that will embody the resultant design. In that case I would recommend learning more code instead of relying on a proxy that will never be as flexible. The best designers I’ve worked with not only understand their own domain but the possibilities and limitations of how it will be executed, because they are also developers.

Basically this. It's mind boggling to think a designer could ever excel without knowing how to work with the medium they're designing for. One of the fundamentals of art school is learning how to work with the characteristics of your medium.

The whole purpose of tools is to make craft accessible to more people. It's perfectly logical not to expect a designer to excel without knowing what they're designing for, but to expect tools to aim for that goal. How much knowledge has to be "in the head" vs. "embedded in the tool" can be debated, but the direction where things generally go seems pretty obvious.

Re: What design tools get wrong

#15

Post by vharuck »

doitLP wrote: post #5

Sounds like the author wants his tools to be as fully featured as the code that will embody the resultant design. In that case I would recommend learning more code instead of relying on a proxy that will never be as flexible. The best designers I’ve worked with not only understand their own domain but the possibilities and limitations of how it will be executed, because they are also developers.

I don't know if "flexible" is the goal. In fact, the listed feature of restricting font and color choices is reducing flexibility. The author seems to just want features to automate repeated tasks.

Re: What design tools get wrong

#16

Post by ebiester »

comis wrote: post #4

I could nitpick the authors points, but honestly this article just boils down to "Design tools need more features!" which I generally agree with. We're living in nice times for design tools though - Figma/Sketch are leading the pack and moving extremely fast. We're no longer in the dark ages of waiting 5+ years for Adobe to implement some basic feature (like being able to round corners on a rectangle). Well, I guess…

More importantly, they have a separate use case that needs a set of features that aren't well covered by the current set of tools.

Maybe it isn't even more features, but rather a completely different tool. This could be a market opportunity.

Re: What design tools get wrong

#18

Post by saagarjha »

doitLP wrote: post #5

Sounds like the author wants his tools to be as fully featured as the code that will embody the resultant design. In that case I would recommend learning more code instead of relying on a proxy that will never be as flexible. The best designers I’ve worked with not only understand their own domain but the possibilities and limitations of how it will be executed, because they are also developers.

Agree wholeheartedly. The best design teams are ones who either “know how the sausage is made” (that is, have a general knowledge of how their design would translate to code) or have guidance from developers on what is and isn’t feasible. The really good ones know the quirks of the platform and will design around them (for example, messing with UINavigationController on iOS breaks a bunch of things and is generally not a good idea).

Re: What design tools get wrong

#19

Post by ypeterholmes »

jdhn wrote: post #11
phaedryx wrote: post #6

I worked at an agency with designers. We (web developers) convinced the designers to use Sketch for the stuff that they did for us. It saved us a ton of time over receiving Photoshop and Illustrator files to work with (the traditional "design tools"). Sure, things could be improved, but I love that we have Sketch and Figma now.

I've found that agencies are behind the times when it comes to design tools. I once exported a screen of a mobile UI from Sketch as a PDF, only to be told "When I opened it in Photoshop, it was one flat layer. Can you send over your original Photoshop file?" I told them that the original was made in Sketch, and that was the last I heard from them.

To be fair, Sketch is a Mac only program, so the team may have just been unable to use it, and preferred to just move on rather than purchasing an entire new computer (and Sketch). It would perhaps been more helpful to have responded by offering to provide your Sketch assets/layers via Zeplin, which is free and web based.

Re: What design tools get wrong

#20

Post by jasim »

doitLP wrote: post #5

Sounds like the author wants his tools to be as fully featured as the code that will embody the resultant design. In that case I would recommend learning more code instead of relying on a proxy that will never be as flexible. The best designers I’ve worked with not only understand their own domain but the possibilities and limitations of how it will be executed, because they are also developers.

When someone says HTML & CSS is terrible I ask them to design something better that lets you represent user interfaces that can adapt across multiple screen sizes, and allow complex layouts that Flexbox and CSS Grid makes possible. It is easy to criticize something if you don't have to worry how you would do it better.

That said, HTML & CSS is just how the world currently is. It doesn't mean that it is the best possible way to do it. CSS could've been very different if not for many fortuitous events in history: https://eager.io/blog/the-languages-which-almost-were-css/

The best possible way to represent user interfaces is to represent them visually. Having to learn code to build UI is just today's limitation. While many have tried and failed to do better, this is still an open question.

Today maybe a designer must understand HTML & CSS to fully embrace the medium. But that means they have to get out of their visual thinking mode, and look at letters on a screen and interpret them in their mind's eye. As programmers we're used to it, but it doesn't mean it is the best nor the only way to do it.

So I'm all for articles like this that questions the status quo instead of accepting defeat and asking people to just get on with the program.

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