Laziness & The Web Designer: How Some Tools Make Designers Lazy

by devinhalladay • 13 years ago

4 23 13 years ago

jalcine• 13 years ago

Enough said, Macaw is going to be one of those tools that separate incapable designers from the ones who know why flexbox is coming to be and what it means.

devinhalladay3• 13 years ago

Exactly! That's an excellent example of how these kinds of tools are depriving designers of learning new techniques.

theolll• 13 years ago

Agreed, I haven't used Macaw but have seen some demonstrations. I did recently use a trial of http://webflow.com/ and although it's a great tool I found it pretty slow and inefficient compared with hand coding. Maybe this is how the next generation will design websites but for me wysiwyg editors never sit right.

vjay• 13 years ago

I'm not lazy. I'm time poor. I would love to have time to learn how to code but I don't. That's why tools like Macaw and others are a great asset to me.

I see tools like Macaw actually being the death of front end development. To me its a waste of time going from Photoshop to code.

Designing in the browser and exporting the code removes the need for front end development.

Sure it might be rough and dirty now but its early days.

dscoville2• 13 years ago

I agree. In some ways, tools like Macaw do promote laziness. You could compare it to the slicing tool in Photoshop that web designers used to use in the late 90s.

However, both design and frontend development are becoming more specialized roles--especially for large web applications. A designer may be proficient in CSS/HTML but it may not be her forte. She may spend most of her time in design software creating wireframes and mockups and a smaller amount of time actually producing CSS/HTML. Furthermore, some large web applications are so complex (in terms of javascript and ajax) that production HTML/CSS is only written by frontend developers.

Therefore, a tool like Macaw is brilliant for a designer who wants to quickly produce actual working prototypes to show interaction, responsiveness, and animations to developers. Simply delivering static screens to developers is not enough anymore.

And, I'm not sure that designing all in the browser is the best approach, especially if you're working on a complex web application. Designing in some design software allows you to brainstorm and iterate through many different design ideas before settling on something.

Furthermore, Macaw doesn't take away your job of writing CSS code. You still have to organize DOM elements and set class names.

PS Macaw didn't pay me to write this. I just think their product is very compelling for rapid prototyping.

devinhalladay3• 13 years ago

I do agree that Macaw could be great for prototyping, but I'm adamant that it will be the death of quality code and websites if designers begin to misuse it.

welly• 13 years ago

Can you suggest some of the ways that you think designers might be able to misuse it?

dscoville2• 13 years ago

I think you misunderstood me. The two roles (designer and frontend developer) are becoming more disparate and specialized. In the future, designers may not be coding full-fledged websites. Your ideas make sense to you now because you are both coding and designing. But, I believe there will come a time in your career where you will have to choose to specialize in one or the other. If you spend more time in design, you will find that your frontend peers will zoom past you (and vice versa).

henriquea• 13 years ago

I agree, the same when people use jQuery without have a basic understanding of Javascript.

By the way comments like that make me cry: "I see tools like Macaw actually being the death of front end development". This guy clearly isn't a web designer and doesn't understand the basic principles of front-end, web browser and the web itself.

zachmalone• 13 years ago

It seems far too simplistic to declare "Macaw will make you into a lazy designer" or "Macaw will transform the way we design the web". Both sides seem to ignore the fact that Macaw is a tool, not the tool.

Macaw (or something that builds off of what Macaw starts) will find a niche in prototyping designs that handcoding will be too slow to do.

Handcoding will remain the backbone and the quality control.

I work with a lot of folks that produce content but have no need, and no time, to learn HTML/CSS. But a tool like Macaw can allow them to deliver content in a way that I can refine instead of building from the ground up. Now, that flow may end up being a terrible waste of time, but a tool that met that niche well would be a welcome addition to my life.

I won't be building a site with Macaw - but I will gladly accept content designed in Macaw to build off of.

mrxd2• 13 years ago

Does this argument work for illustration as well? Do you prefer to write SVG using a text editor instead of using Illustrator?

devinhalladay3• 13 years ago

That's completely irrelevant. The non-human-readable SVG format can't translate to this topic in any respect.

mrxd2• 13 years ago

False. SVG is an XML format, and very much human-readable.

tataniel• 13 years ago

WTF? An Illustrator that never learned Hand Craft illustration as the core of it's art, is not an illustrator but a guy who uses tools to replace and emulate that art, same way, a Front-End must know how to code. If not is just using tools, not a bad thing, but it's just the superficial layer of the work.

lasersalsa• 13 years ago

How about using Macaw for drawing up the layout (kind of like we use Photoshop today) and take advantage of the more web relevant sides of it.

I haven't quite managed to work Photoshop into my workflow, but Macaw looks promising because it puts CSS into an UI.

So personally I consider using it for outputting my ideas and for showing different layouts, but then later coding it down myself.

daitwice• 13 years ago

It's a load of tosh, we all dabbled in some early web coding using packages like freeway and dreamweaver, same shit but better. Let them 'code'. Let's see what happens.

silentsvn• 13 years ago

This is coming from someone whose father just bought them their first Mac. Hmmmmm

zancler• 13 years ago

Sorry, I think you've missed the point here.

a) Why not use something to speed up designing and getting are products out there? You do realise that's the point of tools, and the way they evolve - we build better things that help us work faster and smarter. Otherwise we'd still be satisfied using the first version of Photoshop and coding in Notepad.

b) You're not in a position to say what designers should and shouldn't do.

pulleasy• 13 years ago

Well, a few weeks ago I would have agreed to your opinion.

But after watching Bret Victors great Talk about The Future Of Programming (https://vimeo.com/71278954) I don't think you're 100% right.

Right at the moment I also prefer hand written code over that generated code by some Adobe tool. But as Bret Victor puts it in the talk, I think it would be shame if we create applications in 20 to 40 years in the same way we do today.

Or to put it into another way, who really knows what programming is? Is programming something you do when you put characters into a text editor or is it something you do when you click something together in a tool like Macaw?

I don't think we should wear blinkers but instead should be open for new ways of thinking and approaching stuff. In the end, as long as computers do the stuff we want them to do, I don't really care about how its done anymore.

Just my 2 cents.

kazaroth• 13 years ago

Agree 100%.

Devin's post and attitude are part of the problem and why development is still utterly stuck in writing-lines-of-text in an editor mode. As if that's some canonical 'best way' to produce software.

Suggest Devin goes to Bret's site and reads some of his essays about tools. Software engineering is currently being massively held back (primarily in terms of efficiency) by the reluctance to build out and support tools to abstract creation further away from text editors. IMO.

vickytnz• 13 years ago

I'd like to think that Macaw is like training wheels (or a fixie bike) for getting into web development. Is it production ready-code? Probably not. Does it do a good job of showing how things should work? Hell yes.

thomasjd• 13 years ago

( tataniel 4 days ago | link

You do understand that if someone learns how to illustrate using a specific tool, it would classify them as an illustrator. Just because a person doesnt use the same methods you consider traditional illustration doesnt mean they're not an illustrator. Does it mean they're not as good of an illustrator? Possibly. But that's a bit close-minded.

inspiredmac• 13 years ago

Watch the Macaw demo movie. The code it outputs is pristine. Your comments are disingenuous. Following your logic, we would still be using postscript code to construct documents instead of InDesign.

Laziness & The Web Designer: How Some Tools Make Designers Lazy

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