Surprised nobody has said chair yet. Invest in a good chair so you don't have to pay for it later in life. Herman Miller Aerons can be found used, in good condition, and relatively cheap compared to their new price in my city. If you're going to invest in your workspace, start here.

I'm hoping it means you can keep a centralized "Symbols" file that can be referenced by any other Sketch file. This means rather than keeping one single file that contains all of my project files for templates, pages and various screen sizes, I can restructure them in a better manner.

Hopefully grouped text styles become nested soon too >.<

I don't know that its best practice, but its driven by some Draplin advice of not throwing away failed concepts. Let's say I'm working on an interaction solution for a header, I may try something and get to a point where I can step back or better yet user test it.

The solution isn't perfect, and can be improved upon, so rather than jumping directly into that artboard/file, I instead duplicate it and iterate upon it. Now, when in a design presentation, I have reference for other things that tested poorly and rationale on how it evolved.

Sketch symbols have made this a bit more difficult, but you can detach or bitmap them.

I don't agree with the multiple project aspect. If a senior designer is doing the actual production of design on a project, and it is a big project, splitting time across multiple projects would be irresponsible.

As far as the discussion goes, I think it's two things:

1. The senior designer will have a better designed outcome, but more importantly will get there through a more practiced (experience) process and will do so faster (more efficiently) than the mid-level designer. And, they have the ability to share this knowledge with others.

2. They have the experience. It's simply irreplacable. When you work bigger and bigger projects, what you learn is managing people skills and learning how to communicate the decisions that lead to your designs.

As an example, everybody is a critic as soon as a new logo/rebrand comes out from a big brand. The outcome is heavily criticized, but a lot of the criticism comes from people that aren't familiar with the politics and committee decision making that goes into any rebrand of that scale. Perhaps, somewhere along the way, the designer may have lost a battle on design vision with the client. Sometimes, its inevitable. But as you become more senior, you learn tricks to minimize this.

TLDR: A mid and senior designer may design the same thing, but the senior got there through a more proven process and is able to talk to the design decisions so that they are implemented to his/her vision.

Surprised this isn't higher

I see this line of thinking referenced a bit, and I can't fathom how its realistic without A) settling for low level design or B) being hugely inefficient.

In my opinion, when you're designing its a mix of expertise/tricks in what you know works as well as experimentation. Meaning trial and error: sometimes you try something you think can work, but it doesn't so you try something else and keep improving until it's right. If you settle on the first solution, then yes it can be possible to design in browser. Particularly if you're leveraging some kits and frameworks out there.

But if you keep pushing design in an attempt to find better design solutions, its tedious to test ideas in browser. There's things that are easier (global styles that change many elements vs Photoshop/Sketch) but trying completely new ideas that break those styles are done in a fraction of the time in PS/Sketch.

That being said, it really depends on the project and priorities. I recently came across http://www.agnostic.io/livewires and while I haven't given it a spin, I think this line of thinking will help bridge the gap between wireframes > design > front end and into a single prototype stage.

Bumping this up, I'd love to see some further examples as well!

http://wefunction.com/roundup-of-essential-grunge-design-resources/

There's so many variables. But a key one is YOUR working efficiency. A junior designer may take 20 hours to do a job that a senior designer can do in 6 hours.

Then there's revisions. Homepage/template might take 16 hours, then each subpage might take 4-6 hours. But revisions can take weeks.

So there's really no answer to this. My best suggestion is to get a service like Harvest, and start tracking your hours. After a few projects, you can begin to see how much time you typically spend on the core template, on different subpages, on revisions, client meetings, etc.