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> Once upon a time, design and code worked as one. Web designers would imagine beautiful designs and turn them into beautiful websites with HTML and CSS. This

> Once upon a time, design and code worked as one. Web designers would imagine beautiful designs and turn them into beautiful websites with HTML and CSS. This was never the case and in fact a rewriting of history. My first "proper" job in web development was taking a PSD from a designer and turning that into a XHTML template. Quite a lot of the time the designs looked nice in Photoshop but were almost impossible to implement (at least in CSS 2). I've worked in several since then and most were using Photoshop to create designs or design guidelines to pass over the developers. I used to "cut up the design" and then implement into XHTML template and controls. This was pretty much the norm everywhere if the company cared about how the website / webapp looked. There were some frontend designer types that would write code, but I've met actually two of them during my career as a dev that was heavily front-end focused until 2023.

XenophileJKO 1y ago
Well it was certainly true in many places. I was doing both roles designing and coding. I even had the title of "Webmaster" at the time. I had to do work in Photoshop (or usually Macromedia Fireworks), and then code it up in Cold Fusion.
mcny 1y ago
You are a better person than me. I would have taken the PSD, export as jpeg, add some alt text and slap that as the web page
- thehappypm 1y ago
  And don’t forget to stretch the aspect ratio while you’re at it
- pavlov 1y ago
  That's how we used to do it with the <map> element back in 1995 and the Netscape 2.0 days... And of course that abomination of a HTML tag still works: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/map https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
  - porridgeraisin 1y ago
    What the hell, never heard of that tag before. And I used to scroll through MDN for fun.
  - agedclock 1y ago
    It has some good uses. Like you can have a picture of a map and annotate it with a <map>.
  - AndreasMoeller 1y ago
    Yeah! Image maps FTW! 1995 was a crazy year for the web
aaronblohowiak 1y ago
with flash, it was more prevalent iirc
- apercu 1y ago
  I think with maybe Flash 4? That's when we started pushing the envelope and some of our back end developers started working in Flash. I was procedural programmer (came from Sysadmin - shell and perl) and I had zero desire to learn the whole timeline approach to actions (my memory is fuzzy) but I would give them endpoints to call server side!
- AndreasMoeller 1y ago
  Yes Flash gave everyone a taste of what the workflow could be.
apercu 1y ago
Man, I started building websites and doing CGI coding in 1994 and 1995, which makes me a very early web developer and I don't remember this time at all. In fact, I stopped coding as a job when it became expected that I would do back end database & business logic stuff AND fiddle with front-end code to make it work/look the same in 3 very different browsers, and update the code each time (I'm looking at you Microsoft) a browser vendor would do something stoopid.
- agedclock 1y ago
  I am talking about the 2005-2015 era of web development.
  - apercu 1y ago
    Ah. I was managing teams of developers by then, and most of them had some front end skills, but we still needed dedicated people to deal with... I almost said "edge cases" but since they impacted every single project I guess they were not "edge cases".
    - agedclock 1y ago
      I was still working on Safari Compatibility in 2023. The bugs I was fixing in both CSS and JS were present in the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4. I was utterly fed up of fixing the same stupid issues and decided to look for a more backend focused position. Unfortunately I am now working with AWS which has it own set of headaches.
      - apercu 1y ago
        Seems to be unavoidable in in the era of "move fast and break things" coupled with "let's make it proprietary so we don't have to defend our space with innovation" and incentives for staff to release features we didn't ask for nor want.
        agedclock 1y ago
Arainach 1y ago
It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good. Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple. I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.
- agedclock 1y ago
  > It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good. So someone wrote a bunch of server code (backend) and then handed off for someone to style the frontend. This is what happens now in most teams. The person styling the frontend was never referred to as a "designer". > Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple. I am aware. However that isn't the norm in most places. What happens is that the best dev that can style stuff is lumbered with doing all the frontend work and most of their colleagues don't understand it. Larger orgs have dedicated frontend/backend teams. > I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop. This are actually simpler than they were back then and there is better separate between the frontend and backend. So it actually easier IMO.
  - AndreasMoeller 1y ago
    You might have seen different titles where you worked, but generally the term web designers was broadly used to refer to people using HTML & CSS. The term frontend developer didn't really exists back then because allmost all the logic code was on the server.
jinushaun 1y ago
Seriously. Talk about revisionist history. The web dev workflow before Figma was awful. It never “worked as one”. I love Figma’s dev mode. Saves me and the designer time from measuring sizes and eyedropping colors. Figma also allows me to export assets myself instead of waiting for the designer to do it, or do it myself poorly from Photoshop. The relationship between design and dev is much more collaborative now. It was downright hostile pre-Figma with photoshop and illustrator files. Nevermind versioning, sharing and comments…
- AndreasMoeller 1y ago
  Figma dev mode is definitely better than a PSD file, but it is still a terrible hand off process. I wasn't arguing that the handoff was ever good. I was saying when the person designing the UI also wrote the CSS you didn't need a handoff
AndreasMoeller 1y ago
I am not saying that it was the same at every company and your personal experience may be different. This was absolutely the norm at a lot of companies. It was very normal for the developers to work in either PHP or Ruby on Rails and the designers wrote CSS. It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.
- agedclock 1y ago
  It was never the norm. I've worked as a contractor/consultant in a lot of places and I saw two people that were "designers" that could write HTML and CSS. That is two people in 18 years. > It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS. None of these people knew CSS at all. I am talking pre-2012. Bootstrap version 1 or 2 was out at the time and 960 grid css was only out a few years before.

XenophileJKO 1y ago

Well it was certainly true in many places. I was doing both roles designing and coding. I even had the title of "Webmaster" at the time. I had to do work in Photoshop (or usually Macromedia Fireworks), and then code it up in Cold Fusion.

mcny 1y ago

You are a better person than me. I would have taken the PSD, export as jpeg, add some alt text and slap that as the web page

thehappypm 1y ago
And don’t forget to stretch the aspect ratio while you’re at it
pavlov 1y ago
That's how we used to do it with the <map> element back in 1995 and the Netscape 2.0 days... And of course that abomination of a HTML tag still works: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/map https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  What the hell, never heard of that tag before. And I used to scroll through MDN for fun.
- agedclock 1y ago
  It has some good uses. Like you can have a picture of a map and annotate it with a <map>.
- AndreasMoeller 1y ago
  Yeah! Image maps FTW! 1995 was a crazy year for the web

aaronblohowiak 1y ago

with flash, it was more prevalent iirc

apercu 1y ago
I think with maybe Flash 4? That's when we started pushing the envelope and some of our back end developers started working in Flash. I was procedural programmer (came from Sysadmin - shell and perl) and I had zero desire to learn the whole timeline approach to actions (my memory is fuzzy) but I would give them endpoints to call server side!
AndreasMoeller 1y ago
Yes Flash gave everyone a taste of what the workflow could be.

apercu 1y ago

Man, I started building websites and doing CGI coding in 1994 and 1995, which makes me a very early web developer and I don't remember this time at all. In fact, I stopped coding as a job when it became expected that I would do back end database & business logic stuff AND fiddle with front-end code to make it work/look the same in 3 very different browsers, and update the code each time (I'm looking at you Microsoft) a browser vendor would do something stoopid.

agedclock 1y ago
I am talking about the 2005-2015 era of web development.
- apercu 1y ago
  Ah. I was managing teams of developers by then, and most of them had some front end skills, but we still needed dedicated people to deal with... I almost said "edge cases" but since they impacted every single project I guess they were not "edge cases".
  - agedclock 1y ago
    I was still working on Safari Compatibility in 2023. The bugs I was fixing in both CSS and JS were present in the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4. I was utterly fed up of fixing the same stupid issues and decided to look for a more backend focused position. Unfortunately I am now working with AWS which has it own set of headaches.
    - apercu 1y ago
      Seems to be unavoidable in in the era of "move fast and break things" coupled with "let's make it proprietary so we don't have to defend our space with innovation" and incentives for staff to release features we didn't ask for nor want.
      - agedclock 1y ago

Arainach 1y ago

It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good. Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple. I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.

agedclock 1y ago
> It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good. So someone wrote a bunch of server code (backend) and then handed off for someone to style the frontend. This is what happens now in most teams. The person styling the frontend was never referred to as a "designer". > Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple. I am aware. However that isn't the norm in most places. What happens is that the best dev that can style stuff is lumbered with doing all the frontend work and most of their colleagues don't understand it. Larger orgs have dedicated frontend/backend teams. > I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop. This are actually simpler than they were back then and there is better separate between the frontend and backend. So it actually easier IMO.
- AndreasMoeller 1y ago
  You might have seen different titles where you worked, but generally the term web designers was broadly used to refer to people using HTML & CSS. The term frontend developer didn't really exists back then because allmost all the logic code was on the server.

jinushaun 1y ago

Seriously. Talk about revisionist history. The web dev workflow before Figma was awful. It never “worked as one”. I love Figma’s dev mode. Saves me and the designer time from measuring sizes and eyedropping colors. Figma also allows me to export assets myself instead of waiting for the designer to do it, or do it myself poorly from Photoshop. The relationship between design and dev is much more collaborative now. It was downright hostile pre-Figma with photoshop and illustrator files. Nevermind versioning, sharing and comments…

AndreasMoeller 1y ago
Figma dev mode is definitely better than a PSD file, but it is still a terrible hand off process. I wasn't arguing that the handoff was ever good. I was saying when the person designing the UI also wrote the CSS you didn't need a handoff

AndreasMoeller 1y ago

I am not saying that it was the same at every company and your personal experience may be different. This was absolutely the norm at a lot of companies. It was very normal for the developers to work in either PHP or Ruby on Rails and the designers wrote CSS. It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.

agedclock 1y ago
It was never the norm. I've worked as a contractor/consultant in a lot of places and I saw two people that were "designers" that could write HTML and CSS. That is two people in 18 years. > It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS. None of these people knew CSS at all. I am talking pre-2012. Bootstrap version 1 or 2 was out at the time and 960 grid css was only out a few years before.