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Comment by nathas | Hacker News Reader

> "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, you share it based on principles that just about everyone likes. Your design doesn't need to be unique, but your idea and purpose do.

Design seems a lot easier to get 90% of the way there than get code to a point where programmers are less needed.

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> 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.

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.

It's very, very common for web designers to do their creative work in Photoshop or Illustrator. Then, they either code it themselves or hand the PDF/AI to a coder. So I don't believe the supposed blandness of the web results from a lack of visual design tools.

But would people really like it? There's a 20-year history of people trying to make the web look pretty (splash pages, flash, fancy-schmancy javascript transitions etc.) and people hating them for it. There's something to be said for bland uniformity when what you really care about is the information, not what it looks like.

1) web design is an engineering discipline because you have to make things fast and fault-tolerant on top of making it look good. there's a lot more moving parts to a website than there is to an InDesign export.

2) any tool sufficiently powerful to render complex websites will make it considerably easier to create simple bland websites

3) the mythical oracle described above would not only be of interest to webdesign, but all of computer engineering. i wish you the best of luck.

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.

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

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