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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 toget

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

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.