BoxBox

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Robin Rendle on

BoxBox is a design app that’s currently under development and the designers, Kevin Lynagh and Ryan Lucas, have written a series of articles describing their thoughts that led to its creation. First, they outline the problems with the current state of applications:

We’re still primarily using legacy print design applications to create modern, responsive software interfaces. This has created a unique set of challenges that plague the UI design workflow.

Later, they delve into the serious lack of responsive design features of applications like Photoshop and how these limitations affect the design decisions we’re making:

Perhaps the biggest danger is that these tools lie by omission: They present your design at a single size with fixed rulers and exact pixel values, even though the final application needs to live across many screen sizes. This is akin to designing a sailboat without considering the densities of wood and water until “implementation time.”

This series of articles goes a lot further than defining the problems of our design tools however; they make a lot of useful suggestions, too. They tackle the difficulties of designing reusable components and the need for naming, editing and modifying these objects. Interestingly enough they also discuss the benefits of using code to detect changes over the lifecycle of a design, instead of static mockups.

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