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Somewhat ironically, as a frontend dev, I've never met a UI designer that really convinced me they were in-tune with designing for the context. If Figma did a b

Somewhat ironically, as a frontend dev, I've never met a UI designer that really convinced me they were in-tune with designing for the context. If Figma did a better job of enabling them to design as well as they possibly could for the web or android or whatever they were working on specifically, then that's what I'd get behind. For ne personally, there was always a limitation in how the tools let me design for the responsive web, as well as letting me apply graphic design principles in a way that actually worked for that context. The best I ever got from a designer, even if I could admit that they were much better than me in terms of design skills, it was always hard to tell what was the reason they wouldn't be able to provide a mobile-first design that made sense. It was always some ridiculous large screen layout that they expected me to rethink in order to map it to various sizes.

solardev 4y ago
What do you mean by "for the context"? Are you saying that the designers you worked with only ever provided you with desktop designs, no mobile or tablet views? That'd be pretty strange in this day and age. I usually get at least a mobile and desktop view, sometimes also a tablet view in between. And it's easier to make components responsive these days with auto layout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh98SF7OjUk&list=PLXDU_eVOJTx55HFubfbTL3ellJjBM2QE2&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh98SF7OjUk&list=PLXDU_eVOJT... If you're not getting mobile designs along with larger screen views, well... I dunno what to say. It really should be automatic these days, but you can always explicitly require it from your designers...
- brailsafe 4y ago
  It wasn't necessarily "these days" but pretty recently. No I wouldn't say it was always just a desktop view, but it was usually a sort of clumsily patched together series of independent mobile and desktop views like you describe. Little relationship between the range of sizes fron smallest to largest, and clearly it was started on the largest. There were a few other web based products that have come and gone that attempted to make waves, but when I tried them, they just made the process of designing mobile-first pretty awful and tedious compared to just doing it in code. Maybe Figma got the model just right, but on the other hand I never really heard much complaint from designers I'd work with, because I'd always ask how they liked the tools, but they never really cared about the theory enough, because they weren't implementing or testing.
  - solardev 4y ago
    I see. That makes sense... yeah, the design tools still do struggle with a proper responsive workflow. Some of the less experienced designers also don't necessarily understand the box model or CSS limitations and come up designs more suitable for print that are really hard to translate to a DOM (and result in a poor UX even if you do). The joy of Figma is that it makes collaborative wireframing and prototyping much nicer, but it still can't produce full-fidelity DOM mockups :( I don't see Figma as replacing something like Dreamweaver (which actually operated on the DOM), but more like a better prototyping tool than Photoshop or Sketch -- primarily because it makes it trivial to view designs and iterations on the web. That means the designer still has a lot of freedom to make designs that unfortunately don't neatly conform to the DOM... but that's good, because hey, that's job security for us, right? :) The day we get a true interactive WYSIWYG, FE devs will be outta a job, lol.

solardev 4y ago

What do you mean by "for the context"? Are you saying that the designers you worked with only ever provided you with desktop designs, no mobile or tablet views? That'd be pretty strange in this day and age. I usually get at least a mobile and desktop view, sometimes also a tablet view in between. And it's easier to make components responsive these days with auto layout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh98SF7OjUk&list=PLXDU_eVOJTx55HFubfbTL3ellJjBM2QE2&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh98SF7OjUk&list=PLXDU_eVOJT... If you're not getting mobile designs along with larger screen views, well... I dunno what to say. It really should be automatic these days, but you can always explicitly require it from your designers...

brailsafe 4y ago
It wasn't necessarily "these days" but pretty recently. No I wouldn't say it was always just a desktop view, but it was usually a sort of clumsily patched together series of independent mobile and desktop views like you describe. Little relationship between the range of sizes fron smallest to largest, and clearly it was started on the largest. There were a few other web based products that have come and gone that attempted to make waves, but when I tried them, they just made the process of designing mobile-first pretty awful and tedious compared to just doing it in code. Maybe Figma got the model just right, but on the other hand I never really heard much complaint from designers I'd work with, because I'd always ask how they liked the tools, but they never really cared about the theory enough, because they weren't implementing or testing.
- solardev 4y ago
  I see. That makes sense... yeah, the design tools still do struggle with a proper responsive workflow. Some of the less experienced designers also don't necessarily understand the box model or CSS limitations and come up designs more suitable for print that are really hard to translate to a DOM (and result in a poor UX even if you do). The joy of Figma is that it makes collaborative wireframing and prototyping much nicer, but it still can't produce full-fidelity DOM mockups :( I don't see Figma as replacing something like Dreamweaver (which actually operated on the DOM), but more like a better prototyping tool than Photoshop or Sketch -- primarily because it makes it trivial to view designs and iterations on the web. That means the designer still has a lot of freedom to make designs that unfortunately don't neatly conform to the DOM... but that's good, because hey, that's job security for us, right? :) The day we get a true interactive WYSIWYG, FE devs will be outta a job, lol.