I enjoyed playing with the playground a bit, though as a developer I don't think I'd find it more convenient to use Webflow vs just writing the CSS myself, since Grid is pretty simple. However, maybe I am not your target market, so that's fine.<p>Some more specific feedback:<p>1. The initial example (the Theater flyer) is very busy visually, and looks nothing like a usable web page (sideways text?). Again, maybe this is me misunderstanding what webflow is for, but I think I would prefer a slightly less complex initial view of the grid.<p>2. I don't understand the second image, of the frowny computer icon. Again, looks nothing like a web page and I'm not sure of the relevance of the image to CSS grid. There's a hint says "turn that frown upside down" which I assume is a cute prompt that I should do something with the design... but... what? I looked for an affordance to indicate that I could rotate the grid, but there isn't one. I could find no way to rotate it. What am I supposed to be doing here?<p>3. The fourth one says "These shapes aren't in the right place". Aren't they? Where are they supposed to be? What am I supposed to do here? Is it just trying to show me that things can be moved around? I figured that out on the first page. Also (minor) the arrow is not actually pointing at shapes, it's pointing at a blank part of the layout.<p>4. By the time I get to the end of the examples / demo I haven't seen anything that looks like something that I would be dealing with as a web developer. So, I'm unclear whether this tool is something that is intended for me, or as a way to use grids to design print media?
Sorry but I find this page extremely off-putting...<p>All these colored boxes following my cursor around makes it hard to figure out what I'm even supposed to do.<p>And scroll doesn't work... I'm used to scrolling down to find out more about the product, but this doesn't give me anything to scroll to.<p>And then "try out the new grid playground -->" isn't even a link.<p>I'm sure a lot of thought went into this landing page, but it's so different from normal landing pages that I don't want to have to figure out how it even works in order to learn about the product.<p>Apologies for the criticism, but I assume I'm not the only one who feels frustrated by breaking so many web UX conventions.
Hello HN!
6 years ago we launched our very first playground on HN (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499</a>). It barely worked, but a few months later we go into YC largely due to the awesome feedback we received from it. We thought we'd take a page out of history and show you guys how far we've come, with a version of the original playground, but fully integrated with CSS Grid.<p>The Webflow designer was built mostly in knockout.js in 2013/2014, but we finished a migration to React about a year ago. We’re still learning all the tricks needed to make a very large React app performant, but we haven’t looked back.<p>We'd love to hear your feedback!<p>The CSS Grid playground works in desktop Chrome/Safari/Brave/Vivaldi, as we're still working on Firefox and tablet support.
Webflow is really the bee's knees! Thanks for making such a great product.<p>(I agree with Paul Irish's comment: <a href="https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/315112620627730432" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/315112620627730432</a> .)
I stumbled on webflow last week while looking for design tools and boilerplates. I was put off from going farther down the funnel by the mandatory account creation to try the demo. It's nice to see a there's now an ungated part of the product.<p>I like the idea of more visual design tools, but I'm not sure the browser is the place for it. Just having the demo open destroys my laptop, and it's not exactly a weak machine.
CSS Grids are a game changer in my opinion.<p>Using some "grid-template-areas" + media queries is so cool... It gives you so much control over the layout!
The CSS grid was much-needed in Webflow, but I found the implementation to be pretty unintuitive.<p>There's a few examples I've run across. One is copy + pasting text, links, or images into the grid - maybe it's just the way I'm using it, but it doesn't let me paste an object into the exact grid box I want intuitively.
I love CSS Grid, but still can't use it because of support for IE11. There's still just too many windows 7 users, hopefully not for too much longer.<p>What is webflow doing about that? Do you provide some measure of automated fallback to flex box?
This is my favorite CSS grid sandbox:<p><a href="https://www.cssgridplayground.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cssgridplayground.com/</a>