
From Design to Front-end - sandrobfc
https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/from-design-to-front-end/
======
ggregoire
Might be an unpopular opinion but it's 2018 and you can easily find front-end
developers with enough design sensibility and UX common sense to not need
designers at all for building an app. I've been doing this for 10 years, in
different companies, with different people, and I've seen many front-end
developers being very successful at designing apps on their own.

I personally enjoy it too. I usually draw wireframes on a piece of paper and
iterate, if necessary, with the product team and/or the users. Then I directly
implement the wireframes in React or whatever technology the company uses.
Some developers like to use Photoshop or Sketch, but from my experience, a
digital mockup doesn't add much value over a drawn wireframe so I just skip
these tools.

-

PS: Building a company's website is different than building a company's app.
Your CEO/marketing team will want logos & branding colors (reusable by the
sales & marketing teams for their presentations), illustrations, videos,
animated menus, complex layouts, fancy gradients, parallax scrollings (ew!)
and so on. A designer will probably be better at this job (and more interested
in) than a developer.

~~~
allsunny
The difficulty is of course that, ultimately, design sensibility is
subjective. However, my experience working with folks that have actually
studied design or otherwise specialized in user experience have a marked
improvement (as measured with A/B testing) over the designs that are developed
by "easy to find front-end developers with design sensibility." YMMV.

It's nice to hear of developers that enjoy design, even greater to find ones
that are legitimately good at it, but frequently dealing w/ engineers that
fancy themselves good at design can be... difficult. And, I'm not a designer.

~~~
l9k
There is a lot of designers that are not that good at design either... Some
are just temps, interns, wrongly hired or have switched roles in the company.

And when you target (web) applications, a developer might even have more
experience with the UX as a user and designer!

Each case depends on the qualities of the people involved.

~~~
maigret
Most developers “doing design” don’t only miss some basic skills, like proper
need analysis, but plain don’t have the time to deeply analyze the problem. I
know the “try it and see if it sticks” methods is popular right now, but
monkeys won’t write Shakespeare by chance. I’m not telling that front end
developers are not talented at what they do, they do know something very
valuable. Their skill is to be able to understand designs as well as designer
intents, and get them implemented right.

Now for some side project, of course good front end developers are better than
no designer at all. Are they able to design for scale and high revenue? Only
when they become full time designers.

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vanadium
While the central topic still makes sense, a lot of the technical
prescriptions in there are pretty well outdated and even contradict best
practices today. I'd be curious to know just how long ago this was written.

Edit: March 2016, and their dateline has since been removed:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160311072848/https://www.imagi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160311072848/https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/from-
design-to-front-end/)

~~~
yuchi
It was a little bit dated in 2016 too to be honest.

~~~
vanadium
No question.

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asplake
Hate to be that guy, but it seems crazy that a design-related site would do
such horrible things to scrolling on iPhone to the extent that I switched to
reader view!

~~~
acdanger
I think this might be because there's a CSS scrollY property set on a parent
element and needs: overflow-y: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

set on the content to re-enable momentum scrolling.

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hypertexthero
Regarding designers and developers:

[http://designinginterfaces.com/2011/06/01/designers-that-
cod...](http://designinginterfaces.com/2011/06/01/designers-that-code-a-
response-to-jared-spool/)

~~~
tfranco
Shameless plug :)

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paul7986
I design sites and web apps using bootstrap and within the browser vs. some
wire-framing tool.

Surprisingly enough my front-end design coding has led me to lose out on
design jobs.

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Scarbutt
Is it really best practice to finish your html first and only then add CSS?

~~~
extrapickles
No. It depends on how you and your coworkers like to organize the work.

I’m a fan of quickly tossing something together then refactoring once you have
a better idea of the shapes and names of things.

