A DevTools for Designers

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier on

There has long been an unfortunate disconnect between visual design for the web and web design and development. We’re over here designing pictures of websites, not websites – so the sentiment goes.

A.J. Kandy puts a point on all this. We’re seeing a proliferation of design tools these days, all with their own leaps forward. Yet…

But, critically, the majority of them aren’t web-centric. None really integrate with a modern web development workflow, not without converters or plugins anyway; and their output is not websites, but clickable simulations of websites.

Still, these prototypes are, inevitably, one-way artifacts that have to be first analyzed by developers, then recreated in code.

That’s just a part of what A.J. has to say, so I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.

Do y’all get Clearletter, the Clearleft newsletter? It’s a good one. They made some connections here to nearly a decade of similar thinking:

I suspect the reason that nobody has knocked a solution out of the park is that it’s a really hard problem to solve. There might not be a solution that is universally loved across lines. Like A.J., I hope it happens in the browser.

Direct Link →