Here's an example: http://bendansby.com/antetype.gif
There will always be a place for people who want pixel perfection. I think that place is called print. Eventually, we're going to let go of the idea that we control layouts at the concrete level (as opposed to a more semantic level, i.e. describing relationships and constraints), but that future is harder to see.
But how do you give the designer the opportunity to "sketch" but also describe relationships and constraints? You could use code, but then the designer is then also a de-facto developer. And having to consider relationships and constraints too much can lead to those considerations dictating the design, rather than the other way around.
And the main reason why is that the designer is only capable of thinking in their toolset, which happens to usually be photoshop. PS simply doesn't cut it dealing with the complexity of web applications in all the different form factors it needs to work on. This has lead me to believe that if you're a web designer, your medium is HTML/CSS and potentially JS. So you should understand and be fluent in it. The designer is responsible for actually building out the html templates/styling used, and the developer is responsible for bringing those to life, but each has a lot of input at every step. A lot of crossover builds better projects :)
To the average designer (and almost anyone else) these distinctions don't exist - if you write "code" or something that looks like math, its programming.
Also, I'm not necessarily referring to setting up complex constraints and rules, but more just not having to move a bunch of stuff around with the mouse every time I make a change.
That's exactly my point. It makes you more likely to experiment in that way and less likely to experiment in other ways. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it's one reason why designers and design tools don't focus on automatic layout as much.
[1] https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/
[2] https://vimeo.com/169816724
[3] https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/22644-affi...
Made me watch it twice. I'll be checking Antetype out for that alone.
1. Macaw - http://macaw.co/
2. Google Web Designer - https://www.google.com/webdesigner/
But Antetype provides way better solution for managing padding/margins and moving elements. Thank you for sharing.
are questions they entirely ignore.
They just conceive one screen size (large smartphone) in sketch and can't be bothered to consider any edge case.