Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS | Hacker News Reader

Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS

m.signalvnoise.com

35 pointsingve6 comments

I think CSS is a very powerful language for designing both a document and a user interface. It will not go away soon, so learning CSS as a designer will be a good investment.

From my perspective, I think I'm seeing the big debate about this whole front-end dev.a[html/css/ux] vs front-end dev.b[js/programmer], is not that people in the know, know that CSS is a powerful language for designing doc/ux/ui and fear it will go away.

- It's that, the notion of HTML/CSS is being considered to be entry level knowledge, so you can diminish its value/quality and to have a front-end job, focus on Javascript Framework-XYZ and disregard their significance yourself.

With that said, some people are just meant for more of a design/visual front-end dev, and some are more in it for the code.

That seems like a huge waste of time to have designers do all that work. There should be a component library and a design language established in the company that the designers use to derive new applications. With how things are coupled in modern javascript frameworks I think you would get minimal re-use out of html and css that a designer made.

This is exactly what Bootstrap does and why most Bootstrap-built sites end up looking very similar. If all you're after is functionality, that's easy enough to achieve, but you're going to need designers at some point if you want to differentiate yourself visually.

I didn't say you don't need designers. The designers need to create the design language and help with the component library. It should be unique to your company, but once it is done once there is no reason to do it again unless you want to change branding or update the design for all your companies applications. However, having the designers code out prototypes is a waste of time IMO. They are not likely going to be proficient enough in a modern framework to ship the prototype like the author was saying they do. Design is a full time job and so is front end and at least at the companies I've worked at designing requires full attention of the designers and FE requires full attention of the FE developers.

It's not clear to me whether the costs of lower specialization from having designers do a larger chunk of the work are necessarily worse than communication overhead. Having a component library is great when it'll already do everything you need it to (e.g. because in the course of your organizational history you've gone through a lot of designers and a lot of designs), but the failure mode can be a huge drain.

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