callmevlad

No. One of the original founders and their original designer / head of product are not on the list as they have both left the company.

I decided to quit my job and start Webflow.com on the night that I saw Bret's Inventing on Principle video [1] and read his Magic Ink paper [2]. Based on lots of conversations I've had with other entrepreneurs, I'd say that a lot more people are inspired by Bret's work than you might think...

[1] https://vimeo.com/36579366

[2] http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Webflow — Mountain View, CA - fulltime (INTERN and REMOTE welcome)

We're a small team of 6 engineers and designers on a mission to make web development much easier than it is today. Code-based tools and frameworks are great for us hackers, but designers and entrepreneurs need more intuitive, visual tools in order to build great websites and web applications. Today, Webflow is mostly helpful for static sites... but in the near future, it will empower non-programmers to create much, much more.

As an example of what we're enabling today, here's a site built completely visually in Webflow by a designer: http://interactions.webflow.com/

If you're an exceptional engineer with a strong design background, and you really understand the pain that creative people are having to put up with today just to get their work on the web, we really want to talk to you. We provide great compensation, give out actually meaningful equity, and have a great benefits package. We're also well funded by top investors and financially stable.

You can email me directly ~> vlad@webflow.com

Instead of just sending a resume, please tell me what you'd improve in Webflow instead... that starts a much more interesting conversation :)

We're also hiring for a few other roles: http://jobs.webflow.com

I don't think anyone here is "against coding" - we're just speeding up repetitive tasks that take up way too much time and manual labor to complete. People weren't "against" writing Bezier math or doing typesetting manually - it just became much more efficient to do it visually.

The same thing happened with assemblers, compilers, etc, so it's nothing new - abstraction marches on.

I'm the founder and CEO of Webflow, and I can't agree enough with your statement that code is not the hard part. That's why we're trying to create tools for designers to help them focus on the hard parts (content, usability, etc).

I love what Bret Victor says about this in his Magic Ink paper [1]. Replace "information software" with "web applications" as you read it:

"I suggest that the design of information software should be approached initially and primarily as a graphic design project. The foremost concern should be appearance—what and how information is presented. The designer should ask: What is relevant information? What questions will the viewer ask? What situations will she want to compare? What decision is she trying to make? How can the data be presented most effectively? How can the visual vocabulary and techniques of graphic design be employed to direct the user’s eyes to the solution? The designer must start by considering what the software looks like, because the user is using it to learn, and she learns by looking at it."

The act of creating a solution IS the hard part, not tweaking CSS properties or knowing how to integrate Bootstrap components just right. All those things should just get out of the way and let creatives do the important work, without bogging down in the implementation details.

In case you're interested, I wrote a bit more about this on our blog a while ago: http://blog.webflow.com/designers-will-rule-the-web

[1] http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Sorry, that's not accurate. Webflow sites can be exported at a click of a button, and you own all the code. You can host anywhere you want, make any custom changes, etc.

Most touch devices have terribly slow performance for scroll-based triggers, so we decided to disable them to improve user experience for now. We're working on ways to optimize performance, and will allow a way to manually enable the scroll trigger if you really want to enable it.

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.

1. I think a good abstraction should make it clear what the underlying implementation is doing, and Webflow gives you access to the generated code if you need it. Sounds like a leaky abstraction, but aren't they all? ;)

2. Yes, they do now, but they won't always. For example, we're already working on an intuitive implementation of nested selectors. But I agree with you, things like pseudo-elements, complex selectors, etc are harder to move to the UI - but it's not impossible.

3. I agree with you to an extent, but consider this: the entire Webflow blog - including the JS interactions, working forms, etc - was built by my brother Sergie, a designer who doesn't code. There will always be ultra-custom components, but they don't make up the vast majority of web development.

4. See #3 on forms. And I think you'd be surprised by what you can do with content pulled from a database in a UI. We have something in the works, and honestly it has to be seen to be believed.

Yes, I agree, and web design tools should enforce/encourage good usability. Good usability doesn't have to be tied to software or code.

Pessimism aside, isn't that exactly what happened with desktop publishing software? The work of manual typesetters, etc was automated, and print designers became a lot more relevant.

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.

Yes and no. We're starting with solving for web designers, and the vast majority of their work comes nowhere near the complexity of full-blown applications. The fact that a designer has to know how wire up a form submission, or have to write JavaScript just to get a navigation bar working, or worry about setting up a MySQL server just to get some dynamic content on the page seems broken. It feels like what blogging used to be in the 90s - code HTML and push via FTP. But we've moved past that, and I know we can move past hand-coding HTML/CSS/Wordpress when creating dynamic websites and simple applications (of which many are glorified CRUD form wrappers).

I'm not arguing that we should get rid of code altogether, that is an impossible task. I'm saying that we shouldn't require code for things that can be automated, and there sure are tons of parts of web development that can be.

Looks like I can no longer edit the title, but you're right.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/there-are-no-...

Some background: Warren Buffett Offers $1 Billion For Perfect March Madness Bracket

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/01/21/warr...

(Co-founder of Webflow here...)

Would you say these are basic? (All created with Webflow.)

http://artemis.com/ http://cmplain.com/ http://www.zombi.nl/ http://zombidemos.webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/gallery

(Co-founder here...)

The Webflow.com website was mostly designed in Webflow, but we had some limitations at the time that required us to hand-code things. A new version is in the works that is completely created in Webflow, so it's only a matter of time :)

Pretty much all of our other sites (e.g. [1][2]) are already built/hosted/managed on Webflow.

[1] http://tutorials.webflow.com/ [2] http://jobs.webflow.com

It looks like the canvas is only there to render the background gradient. Pretty sure all the animation is done via CSS3.

I don't think they're trying to hide anything, maybe just haven't gotten around to creating an About page. Both founders used to work for Microsoft: https://angel.co/buttercoin

It's a protocol-relative URL, which inherits the protocol of the parent page.

http://www.paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/

It's weird to see Linus on the other side of being disciplined, and a pretty stark contrast to his own slightly more abrasive style.

For example: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

Webflow (https://webflow.com) is made precisely for this. To get a feel for what it's like, have a look at the playground: http://playground.webflow.com/ (I'm one of the founders.)

The pain of the PSD->HTML workflow, especially around responsive design, is one of the reasons we're working on Webflow (https://webflow.com). While Photoshop will have a critical role in web design for a long time to come, having to deal with multi-resolution elements is extremely tedious.

Also, Photoshop layer styles are way behind what's actually possible with CSS3 these days (multiple shadows, multiple background images, etc), so designers who have to implement a website end up doing their work twice. With a tool like Webflow, implementation work is part of the designer's workflow, so once something looks good on screen, it's actually ready to ship.

Granted, designers have to learn the base concepts of how content flows in a website (the box model), but I think that's a small price to pay for designing directly in the intended medium.

Yes, plenty: https://webflow.com (I work here), https://jetstrap.com, http://froont.com/, http://www.divshot.com/

Relevant discussion on Macaw's use of absolute positioning: http://forum.macaw.co/discussion/64/absolute-positioning-and...

Have you checked out https://webflow.com? Easily passes that simple test. (I'm one of the founders.)

It's a library they built in-house: https://github.com/easelinc/tourist

Webflow (YC S13) - Mountain View, CA or Remote - Full time

At Webflow, we're creating a killer web design platform. We make it easy to create and launch incredibly-custom, responsive websites (and soon, web applications) using our in-browser editor. Our mission is to empower designers/agencies/entrepreneurs/mygrandma to create beautiful and functional web experiences, without having to learn all the crazy ins and outs of web development.

We are building really advanced frontend tools in HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript (+ Angular/Knockout/VanillaJS/Node/Mongo/etc), and are looking for experienced front-end hackers who have a strong sense of design and a passion for creating amazing and precise tools. Our entire front-end dev team is composed of designers who have fallen in love with programming, so if that describes you, we should talk!

Here's an example of the kinds of tools you'd help us build: http://playground.webflow.com/

We're also looking for a world-class web designer to join our team full-time. Your job would be to use Webflow for a living, build sites for clients, create awesome case studies for others to learn from, and overall help us make Webflow more awesome. We already have over 60,000 web designers using our platform, and you would be their #1 champion.

We're well-funded by awesome investors and generating healthy revenue, so we're in this for the long haul. We have awesome perks and benefits, we work sane hours, have a lot of fun, and have great compensation (salary + equity) to boot. If you want to get in on the ground floor of changing the face of web development, this is where you should be.

If you're interested, I'd love to have a chat. Shoot me a note to vlad@webflow.com

Extra credit to anyone who can implement this in HTML/CSS without using the canvas element. Since CSS transformations are hardware accelerated, I bet it can be made to look as smooth as the reference GIF.