4 ms·

Can I be really predictable and give a "very different response"? Worked in magazines for years, still do a lot of print cartography, and I find CSS a completel

Can I be really predictable and give a "very different response"? Worked in magazines for years, still do a lot of print cartography, and I find CSS a completely different mindset to Illustrator or InDesign or Quark or whatever. It just feels like a weird outlier to me - not freeform enough to fulfil the "design" role, not programmatic enough to fulfil the "developer" role.

davidivadavid 8y ago
Same for me. As someone who's done a lot of layouts in InDesign, it seems to me that CSS is only starting to offer decent tools to reproduce that mental model (e.g. CSS grid). But somehow doing incredibly basic things such as positioning or aligning elements can still take inordinate amounts of time.
Klonoar 8y ago
Yeah, I hear this a bunch, and I can see why it'd feel that way. My standard response is that HTML/CSS simply didn't advance enough for a period of n years to make it easier, so it (for awhile) was arguably stuck in the late 90s/early-mid 2000s for layout concepts. The other response to you noted it's gotten easier lately too.
ummonk 8y ago
Yes, this. So much this.
Kagerjay 8y ago
I too worked in catalog design / printing. I had a lot of catalogs from many manufacturers (some 5 to 10 years old). This was how I learned UX design, I benchmarked design decisions made by other companies. Since I knew how those companies operated, this gave me insights on what good/bad designs are. Designing a catalog is similar to designing a SaaS tool. Designing a magazine is similar to designing a marketing website. Working with AdobeIndesign taught me the following things, that translated into web development: (1) Importance of style guides (things like BEM, SMACSS, etc): If you don't lay these out upfront, your catalog becomes incredibly inconsistent and hard to manage (too many components everywhere). (2) How to organize your SCSS files - it's actually almost the same way you do it in Adobe Indesign. There's a `base` folder for global layout styling (fonts), `components` folder for things like buttons, tables, etc. (3) How to layout a webpage. In Indesign, you start with the header/footer usually in your masterpage layout. Then you design each page from top to bottom generally (for a catalog at least). The viewport is more or less the size of a single page. You can only fit so much content there. (4) Font-types - Open indesign, dig through all 100+ font types and see what the differences are. Some can handle fractional fonts, others have support for narrow styling (Arial). (5) Design combinations - Take a look at a Grainger or McMastercarr catalog. There's many tricks for cramming a lot of information on one page. Minimal font sizes, horizontal lines in tables, use of white-space eye relief, consistent styling, etc. (6) Constraints - If you saddle-stitch or 3 punch bind your catalog, your margins differ. If you make brochures, it's like designing for mobile devices (7) UX Interaction - There's many ways of looking at a page, and where you want to draw a user's attention first. UX tools are still playing catchup to what Indesign has offered for years. I would say CSS is different mindset in that there are more rules. And you have to usually handcode it yourself. It's "design" in the sense of knowing what colors to use, size of content, etc. "Development" in the sense of knowing how to use master-page layouts / component designs upfront.

davidivadavid 8y ago

Same for me. As someone who's done a lot of layouts in InDesign, it seems to me that CSS is only starting to offer decent tools to reproduce that mental model (e.g. CSS grid). But somehow doing incredibly basic things such as positioning or aligning elements can still take inordinate amounts of time.

Klonoar 8y ago

Yeah, I hear this a bunch, and I can see why it'd feel that way. My standard response is that HTML/CSS simply didn't advance enough for a period of n years to make it easier, so it (for awhile) was arguably stuck in the late 90s/early-mid 2000s for layout concepts. The other response to you noted it's gotten easier lately too.

ummonk 8y ago

Yes, this. So much this.

Kagerjay 8y ago

I too worked in catalog design / printing. I had a lot of catalogs from many manufacturers (some 5 to 10 years old). This was how I learned UX design, I benchmarked design decisions made by other companies. Since I knew how those companies operated, this gave me insights on what good/bad designs are. Designing a catalog is similar to designing a SaaS tool. Designing a magazine is similar to designing a marketing website. Working with AdobeIndesign taught me the following things, that translated into web development: (1) Importance of style guides (things like BEM, SMACSS, etc): If you don't lay these out upfront, your catalog becomes incredibly inconsistent and hard to manage (too many components everywhere). (2) How to organize your SCSS files - it's actually almost the same way you do it in Adobe Indesign. There's a `base` folder for global layout styling (fonts), `components` folder for things like buttons, tables, etc. (3) How to layout a webpage. In Indesign, you start with the header/footer usually in your masterpage layout. Then you design each page from top to bottom generally (for a catalog at least). The viewport is more or less the size of a single page. You can only fit so much content there. (4) Font-types - Open indesign, dig through all 100+ font types and see what the differences are. Some can handle fractional fonts, others have support for narrow styling (Arial). (5) Design combinations - Take a look at a Grainger or McMastercarr catalog. There's many tricks for cramming a lot of information on one page. Minimal font sizes, horizontal lines in tables, use of white-space eye relief, consistent styling, etc. (6) Constraints - If you saddle-stitch or 3 punch bind your catalog, your margins differ. If you make brochures, it's like designing for mobile devices (7) UX Interaction - There's many ways of looking at a page, and where you want to draw a user's attention first. UX tools are still playing catchup to what Indesign has offered for years. I would say CSS is different mindset in that there are more rules. And you have to usually handcode it yourself. It's "design" in the sense of knowing what colors to use, size of content, etc. "Development" in the sense of knowing how to use master-page layouts / component designs upfront.