5 comments

  • Sacha GreifSacha Greif, over 5 years ago

    (Cross-posting my Medium reply here)

    Good post, but I think there’s a simple explanation to why even “design leaders with years of experience” feel overwhelmed: they have years of now-obsolete experience!

    Someone learning CSS now wouldn’t need to bother with floats, they can go straight to Flexbox and CSS Grid. Someone learning JavaScript today can skip jQuery and go straight to React. No need to master Photoshop’s dozens upon dozens of menus and commands, just open up Figma!

    Rather than discourage newcomers by complaining about how complex things have become all the time, “design leaders” should be pointing them at all these new tools (including Webflow ;) that can save them time and help them avoid making the same mistakes we made.

    3 points
    • Olivier FOlivier F, over 5 years ago

      Someone learning CSS now wouldn’t need to bother with floats, they can go straight to Flexbox and CSS Grid.

      You still need to know floats if you want to, you know, float things next to flowing content. Grid and flexbox don't do that kind of thing.

      I think you will see a lot of use of floats given the design power it has gained with shape-outside.

      0 points
      • Andrew Richardson, over 5 years ago

        You still need to know floats if you want to, you know, float things next to flowing content. Grid and flexbox don't do that kind of thing.

        Yeah but you don't need to know as much about it as you did when basically the entire website was built around it. It has a very specific niche use now, which is easier to learn than every nuance of how it interacts with the hacky float grids.

        0 points
    • Marcel van Werkhoven, over 5 years ago

      Experience matters but in different ways than most other professions. I think that if you learn the right problem solving skills it doesn't matter if you build a website in Divi, Webflow, Dreamweaver or code everything by yourself. It will be a good website regardless of the tools you use.

      However, you need to spend some time to actually learn the tools and the process and improve your skills. Most of the sense of 'overwhelming' comes from folks who think that they can just learn how to build a website in 2 hours or turn their Sketch design into a perfectly implemented website within a day.

      It takes time and people seem less and less willing to spend time to learn and/or build things. About 5 years ago when I started doing this professionally I spend hours and days debugging for Internet Explorer 8. Something that seems to have disappeared completely (thank god). As a front-end dev I think things have gotten way easier.

      I also think at times we get too caught up in the process and tools and don't think enough about the end result. I mean, stuff like Sass or Less is not necessary and a static HTML page has little use for React or Vue. Just because the tools are there doesn't mean you need to use them.

      1 point
  • James Mikrut, over 5 years ago

    From my Medium response:

    The title of this article drew me in but that was before I saw it was written by Webflow. I think you guys have great marketing and possibly a great product (admittedly I’ve never used it) but as a web developer of 10 years it hurts me inside to see that this article’s solution to this problem is basically ‘use our software!’

    Seems convenient for Webflow, but when you consider what’s best for the future of the internet, I hardly think that this is the way forward. The problem is much larger than Webflow and unfortunately I think this article short-changes and insults web developers everywhere as a result.

    0 points