7 comments

  • Mitch Malone, almost 4 years ago

    Designer-developer handoff is an anti-pattern.

    5 points
  • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, almost 4 years ago

    I don't see tools like Anima or Invision or Zeplin being the future of developer handoff. These all speak to fundamental issues with Figma and Sketch and Studio being built on rendering engines that need to manually and painstakingly recreate features that come out of the box with HTML and CSS. Thus why in Framer X you can easily build responsive layouts or buttons that resize with their content. I mean in Figma and Sketch you can't build a button that has an icon and text centered in the button and adjusts with content. You HAVE to use third party plugins, and even then it doesn't properly emulate how it works in HTML and CSS.

    That's not even getting into the nuances of Grid, Flexbox, percentage and viewport based layouts, etc.

    The moment tools like Modulz or Hadronapp come out and become more popular a lot of these approaches to developer handoff will simply cease to be relevant.

    3 points
    • Otomar NemecekOtomar Nemecek, almost 4 years ago

      I like where these new tools are going. However, it's still just simple HTML/CSS code. You can't do funky code patterns nor generate the design specs in languages which do matter in mobile or desktop environment these days. Anyway, have my upvote as I agree with your thinking.

      0 points
      • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, almost 4 years ago

        However, it's still just simple HTML/CSS code. You can't do funky code patterns nor generate the design specs in languages which do matter in mobile or desktop environment these days.

        I'd love to hear more about this. What do you mean by funky code patterns or languages which do matter in mobile/desktop environment?

        I think one issue here is that the expectation is eventually these designs will output production ready code. That is not what I'm looking for. I still want a tool that is just for prototyping and designing UIs. HTML/CSS just happens to be better at that than custom made rendering systems like Sketch, Figma, and InVision use.

        0 points
    • Lee Fuhr, almost 4 years ago

      Enter: Webflow.

      0 points
      • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, almost 4 years ago

        Webflow is awesome and a great sign of things to come, but is too rigid in regards to accessing code and doing things within their constraints (you can't add custom media queries in the UI). But I do think it goes to show just how much can be done with HTML and CSS in a GUI environment.

        0 points