Why I Like Designing in the Browser

The earliest web didn’t need design tools–all we had were simply a few heading levels, paragraphs, lists, a few inline elements. No colors or fonts or even images. For years these things were added to HTML piecemeal, while designers discovered techniques (better described as ‘hacks’) for creating page layouts and designs wth these rudimentary tools.

These approaches could be complex and error prone–using tables with images to create space was a technique that remained for years. Around the same time, though it took years to mature and longer to get widely adopted, CSS introduced more sophisticated layouts with absolute positioning (we discovered the use of float for creating layouts some years later).

And alongside these new technologies and techniques came hybrid web design/development tools like HotPage (I think it was called? From Adobe?), Microsoft Front Page, and then DreamWeaver, the killer app for Web Design. These WYSIWYG tools ushered in a new era of web design.

In the decades since, we’ve oscillated between coding designs directly, and using design tools, either to prototype or to implement these designs. Douglas Engelbart, a giant of human computer interfaces called WYSIWYG, ‘what you see if all you get’–observing that when we use such tools we are constrained to only what such tools enable.

When it comes to the web, many designers have continued the practice of designing in the browser. Perhaps first widely articulated by designer extraordinaire Andy Clarke, here Tyler Sticka talks about the benefits of designing in the browser in the age of Figma. A good companion read to the recent What do developers want in a design handoff?