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I've never worked on a production website or web app that managed to achieve the "small css stylesheet and a base set of components." Especially not in the resp

I've never worked on a production website or web app that managed to achieve the "small css stylesheet and a base set of components." Especially not in the responsive design era. Can it be done in theory? Sure. But in my experience working as a web developer it's one of those goals that always seems attainable at the beginning of a project but for various reasons never comes to fruition by the time it's launched and certainly not by the time it's being retired after months or even years of extending, iteration, changing development teams and maintenance.

ratww 6y ago
I've worked in a few. The trick is starting with a development team with a good grasp of CSS and a designer with a clear direction, instead of jumping straight into Bootstrap or something similar. You can replace the designer with a developer with design experience. It's far from impossible. One of the coolest I did was when I was lead dev in a university and our CSS for the teacher/student dashboard was less than 20k. I used ASP.NET WebForms components, and we didn't have too much variety in terms of components. It looked pretty good for the time (2012) and it was also responsive and teachers/students added it to their iPhone/Android screen. Another one was a web version of a Windows Desktop App. Also didn't use Bootstrap, but got it done pretty quickly. Bootstrap wouldn't work for us since we had to keep the look and feel of a native app. I've also transitioned one app that had more than 1MB of minified css to less than 100kb, which is not exactly small but it's still one order of magnitude less. The trick was vendoring the three third-party frameworks we were using and removing everything we weren't using, and also using PurifyCSS to detect unused nodes and deleting them. Then we refactored to put the CSS back into Vue.js components and voila. A lot of people in HN will say it's a huge waste of time but our market was a 3rd world country, so it made a lot of financial sense for us to make me waste a week on that. One of the most fun and rewarding experiences I ever had. I wish most developers weren't so bullish about not wanting to spend time optimizing this stuff.
- nbzso 6y ago
  "You can replace the designer with a developer with design experience. It's very far from impossible." And go ask why websites are looking the same. Disclaimer: I am designer (real one). I have become frontend dev with time and moved in this direction naturally driven by challenges in implementation. At first challenge was to move away from table based layouts (xhtlm/separation of content and presentation), next was AJAX,jQuery and now is React, Vue, Angular. In all of this mess I judge the final results. The Product is made to serve the user. In some point in time the incentive moved to "technology serves developers and business" first. This is the real problem for me. I have found in my practice when hiring designers the problem is lack of proper design foundation, using frameworks and tricks is not design process, its design implementation. I have suggestion: Obviously developers hate designers (I doubt that they have worked with real one - and reaction towards "designers" is right), do me a favor and eliminate design by building AI solution already. You have ton of historically proven quantitive data what the principles of visually good design are. Just throw it in GAN, use style transfer and do it. You can split test UX and UI and decorate the results with GAN data. Problem solved. In design space education is broken, business owners and managers don't value design highly so everyone will be happy. Designers will find what to do with their talents, don"t worry:)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
sbergot 6y ago
Functional libraries such as tailwindcss are popular because they are a good way to achieve this goal.
- mattacular 6y ago
  Maybe if you're not working with a designer/team.
  - wildrhythms 6y ago
    I promise you can achieve what the designer envisions with Tailwind, and I would challenge you to describe a design case outside of Tailwind's abilities. I was skeptical too for a long time.

ratww 6y ago

I've worked in a few. The trick is starting with a development team with a good grasp of CSS and a designer with a clear direction, instead of jumping straight into Bootstrap or something similar. You can replace the designer with a developer with design experience. It's far from impossible. One of the coolest I did was when I was lead dev in a university and our CSS for the teacher/student dashboard was less than 20k. I used ASP.NET WebForms components, and we didn't have too much variety in terms of components. It looked pretty good for the time (2012) and it was also responsive and teachers/students added it to their iPhone/Android screen. Another one was a web version of a Windows Desktop App. Also didn't use Bootstrap, but got it done pretty quickly. Bootstrap wouldn't work for us since we had to keep the look and feel of a native app. I've also transitioned one app that had more than 1MB of minified css to less than 100kb, which is not exactly small but it's still one order of magnitude less. The trick was vendoring the three third-party frameworks we were using and removing everything we weren't using, and also using PurifyCSS to detect unused nodes and deleting them. Then we refactored to put the CSS back into Vue.js components and voila. A lot of people in HN will say it's a huge waste of time but our market was a 3rd world country, so it made a lot of financial sense for us to make me waste a week on that. One of the most fun and rewarding experiences I ever had. I wish most developers weren't so bullish about not wanting to spend time optimizing this stuff.

nbzso 6y ago
"You can replace the designer with a developer with design experience. It's very far from impossible." And go ask why websites are looking the same. Disclaimer: I am designer (real one). I have become frontend dev with time and moved in this direction naturally driven by challenges in implementation. At first challenge was to move away from table based layouts (xhtlm/separation of content and presentation), next was AJAX,jQuery and now is React, Vue, Angular. In all of this mess I judge the final results. The Product is made to serve the user. In some point in time the incentive moved to "technology serves developers and business" first. This is the real problem for me. I have found in my practice when hiring designers the problem is lack of proper design foundation, using frameworks and tricks is not design process, its design implementation. I have suggestion: Obviously developers hate designers (I doubt that they have worked with real one - and reaction towards "designers" is right), do me a favor and eliminate design by building AI solution already. You have ton of historically proven quantitive data what the principles of visually good design are. Just throw it in GAN, use style transfer and do it. You can split test UX and UI and decorate the results with GAN data. Problem solved. In design space education is broken, business owners and managers don't value design highly so everyone will be happy. Designers will find what to do with their talents, don"t worry:)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

sbergot 6y ago

Functional libraries such as tailwindcss are popular because they are a good way to achieve this goal.

mattacular 6y ago
Maybe if you're not working with a designer/team.
- wildrhythms 6y ago
  I promise you can achieve what the designer envisions with Tailwind, and I would challenge you to describe a design case outside of Tailwind's abilities. I was skeptical too for a long time.