<i>"If the web is to reach its full potential, we have to empower many more people, with fewer technical boundaries. The needs and capabilities of the internet will grow faster than society can train up new computer programmers, so we have no choice but to transcend past programming to interact with this beautiful new medium."</i><p>I couldn't make my job go away if I wanted it to. You don't just say, oh, this problem is too hard, so we're going to transcend it.<p>I wanted to do frontend/design-ish work the last two job searches. What did I do instead? Well, I managed to actually get some in on 20% projects, and spent the remainder on image processing, field algebras, and... lots of stuff in between. Like administering an Oracle DB, hacking postgres plugins, munging data with clojure and python, fighting with SBT and the scala type system. Before you can start playing with design, you have to write the code to make it happen. And before you can even do that, you have to get the customers' data out of their database, munge it, get it replicated across your own datacenters, etc.
> "Unlike many technical disciplines, design is impossible to automate"<p>I disagree. You have design-as-a-service with things like 99designs.com, you have great templates with WordPress, you have Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks that get you 90% of the way there (works on different form factors automagically, lots of flexibility), you have style guides for native iOS and Android apps...<p>You don't "automate" design, you share it based on principles that just about everyone likes. Your design doesn't need to be unique, but your idea and purpose do.<p>Design seems a lot easier to get 90% of the way there than get code to a point where programmers are less needed.
"If that wasn’t enough, the explosion of smart phones and tablets has made the job of the web designer even harder. Designers can no longer assume a fixed-width canvas..."<p>They never should have, and I'd say it's probably <i>easier</i> in some respects with smartphones because, while there's a multitude, they're all fixed, and you can generally target, say, 3-6, and cover a huge variety. And people generally can't change their font sizes.<p>Compare with dozens of monitor and window sizes on desktops. 13, 15, 19, 20+, with varying types of DPI and available fonts on systems. Not so much monitor sizes I mean, but... is the browser window full screen, or partial? People resizing windows would lose info, or not see it in the first place, and get lost. Back in the early days the "256-color palette" was considered a requirement for many projects.<p>While it's a <i>hassle</i> to develop for various size phones, it's still a more controlled and uniform set of sizes, imo; it just takes a lot more work.
> <i>Design is a universal language. It transcends borders, races, and spoken languages. It is constantly changing and adapting to new ideas, new platforms, and new environments. It’s inherently more human than programming - most of us can tell good design from bad, while a only a tiny percentage can identify good code. Design is the interface between the problems we face, and the solutions we create to overcome them.</i><p>Oh jeezus...I consider myself more a humanist than a tech evangelist, but this makes me throw up in my mouth. Design is <i>vital</i>, don't get me wrong, but the problems and tensions we have with design often come from abstract/vague specs and opinions...Placing value on "code" doesn't necessarily mean "Programmers-first"...but in order for a sane eco-system with relatively stable specs, programmers and engineers cannot take a back seat to the design process.
Ok,guy selling a wysiwyg , webflow , "drag and drop with no code".<p>OP, doesnt understand that, these webbased products DONT WORK.<p>Even during the flash area,designers needed basic coding knowledge to add listeners to events, and, the twist is , some designers became coders because they had to , in order to stay competitive on the flash job market.<p>Web designers WILL always need to learn to code if they want to stay competitive ,period.<p>Things change fast on the web,and wysiwyg web tools cant integrate all the latest web techs, all the latest best practices,etc...<p>Finally, web designers dont work in the void,they work in teams with coders, and coders hate wysiwyg generated code.<p>So no ,not going to happen,like it did not happen with Dreamweaver (that even tries to be less designer oriented and more code oriented now).
I don't believe there is a major leap to be made. Here's why.<p>There have always been visual editors for the web. As the author suggests, they have relied on abstractions of the underlying code. For example, the CSS box model (width/height, padding, border, margin) are often abstracted as draggable handles on bounding boxes. Yet these systems suffer from some fundamental limitations:<p>1. They obscure the underlying implementation, making it harder for designers to understand and fix problems when they inevitably occur. On a related note, the lack of visibility into the code inhibits learning.<p>2. They lack the power to express more advanced styling rules, such as the following:<p><pre><code> /* Paragraphs have 20px margin above unless they follow a heading */
p {margin: 20px 0;}
h1 + p {margin-top: 0;}
/* Don't indent the top-level UL, but indent 20px for each level of nesting */
ul {margin: 0;}
ul ul {margin: 0 0 0 20px;}
/* Divs that are immediate children of forms get 20px margins, but divs nested
within those don't. */
form > div {margin: 20px 0;}
</code></pre>
Or, if they <i>do</i> have the power to express those rules, they're doing so in one of two ways: Letting you write CSS ad-hoc, or building a complex GUI that maps to those CSS rules. In the former case, you're back to hand-coding. In the latter case, you're using a clunkier proxy for hand-coding.<p>3. They lack the power to express idiosyncratic JavaScript interactions. They can provide some generic primitives like rollouts. But many, many real-world apps need fine-grained control over interaction. For example, today I built a system of nested lists with sorting, deletion, and insertion to arbitrary depth. It was so idiosyncratic that it couldn't have possibly been made into a generic component in a visual editor. Problems of that nature are fairly common in my work. And no, the idiosyncrasy is not a sign that something's wrong: Different problem domains often call for (slightly) different interfaces.<p>4. They don't play very well with dynamic websites. If you need forms or for HTML to be generated from a database--both of which are very common needs--you can't express that generically in a visual editor. Expressing that kind of logic is an act of programming. Historically, efforts to abstract programming into a visual process have been disappointing or outright failures. Source code is the only workable way to express a computer program.
"The next 25 years of the web will be all about design. We can make significantly more progress by opening up the power of web development to the masses."<p>No, the next 25 years will be about mobile, and whatever that evolves in to. More specifically, it'll be about using whatever hardware manufacturers give developers access to. How design plays in to that will be tied to the same constraints that development is tied to.
This problem, taken more generally, is the question "What will come of us as we progress towards the singularity?"<p>Most of us assume every job will eventually be automated on some longterm time scale. This is based on the assumption is that all the hard AI problems will be solved.<p>The only argument to be had, then, is which of the jobs will be automated <i>first</i>? Design (Artistry), or Engineering? Many commenters here (as engineers, I assume) defend the longterm prospects of engineering. Let's try to break this problem down a bit.<p>If you want to automate the creation of art, which I assume is the capability to give a computer an input similar to "Design a good looking site", or "Make a pretty picture", then you need a computer that has knowledge of 1) computers, and 2) humans. If the computer doesn't understand humans as well as humans themselves do, then the art will be limited and there will be humans who can create better art.<p>If you want to automate Engineering, you need a computer that has knowledge of 1) computers, and 2) the language and communication required by artists. This seems at first glance not much different from solving the hardest AI problems, but the knowledge required is a small subset of total human knowledge, and it's possible that this is implemented first because of hardware limitations preventing us from solving true, complete human-knowledge AI.<p>We, as engineers, are putting ourselves out of jobs. We're making our jobs easier by creating better programming languages and automating as much of our own work as possible. There has to be a limit to this, after which we're no longer telling a computer lines of code, but instead speaking to it in natural language. Once this happens, we're no longer necessary. But I can see a future where the people telling the machines what to do are still valuable, though they will eventually be automated too.
I think in the Valley there's an over-emphasis on design, sometimes one that comes at the expense of utility.<p>If we look at the most popular places in the Web, like Craigslist or Wikipedia (or day I say YC), none of them are particularly beautiful. And they could be made more beautiful today sure, but they started with something highly utilitarian.<p>At many start-up events, I've seen ideas that didn't really solve problems and weren't that utilitarian, but were so BEAUTIFUL that people assumed they were great. I worry about this, because then the founders get a lot of "false positive" responses, and when they actually enter the marketplace, they might find that reality <> expectation. Bad for them, but also bad for everyone else, because what's the cost of this huge emphasis on design as opposed to true utility?
OT: When I scroll down on that page in the latest Safari the title scrolls over the text [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/600458/Screen%20Shot%202014-04-02%20at%2018.09.18.png" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/600458/Screen%20Shot%202...</a>
"The design of a solution is much more important than its implementation under the covers, since the latter is almost always invisible to the user and can take on so many different permutations. Whether it’s a simple web page, a data-rich online newspaper, or a full-blown interactive application - how users experience it easily trumps the underlying code used to build it."<p>did you just say that how an application LOOKS is more important than how it is implemented? Ok not even worth talking about this anymore.... wish I could downvote...
Thank goodness. If designers don't need development help to bring this stuff to life, we can finally move on to bigger and better things. Hurry up! We can then focus more on building what Warren Buffet calls "moats" around our business so that people can't easily create "me too" competitors.<p>It's interesting this article mentions that development has just been getting more complex. I don't know that this trend will reverse, but good luck.
If the web will solely consist of static .jpegs then yes: designers will rule the web. However at the moment our webpages are interactive and starting to be adaptive and accessible as well. We also might have some data on the backend that need to be manipulated in the UI. And theres also performance. I don't think there is a way to expose all these to designers without requiring them to code and actually have an understanding beyond design.<p>> 3D artists have modeling and animation software that they can manipulate directly<p>And nowadays they also have to start worrying about the physical properties of those models.<p>Reference: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw</a><p>It appears to me that this article generally doesn't want to understand the difference between print and web.
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding from people that do not know how to program "in the large". Real programming is actually heavily reliant on human creativity and synthesis. Just like good visual design.<p>Programmers are always automating and we are succeeding at it. Many tasks and roles have been eliminated in the last ten years by better tools and services.<p>Designers don't really do that, they get better tools to better represent their vision from...programmers.<p>I think design and art is crucial and the people that do it well are critical. But not as critical as the people that support the entire ecosystem.<p>If I were to say who would rule anything, it would be mathematicians, in every domain of knowledge - even design - mathematics is the ultimate intellectual tool to express abstraction, cardinal to the act of automating and reducing.
I disagree with your vision of the next 25 years. Enterprises waste money creating new html templates for each web solution (as well as said developers). Imagine if all web pages had minimal layout design (with little or NO usage of images/css). That way developers can spend 100% of their time on the backend (business logic) - not on the front-end. Thus development time could decrease and features can increase. This is because front-end is a waste of time and if only we can culturally accept functional (think Google.com) not creative design, then no developers will rule the web.
It's ironic that the very same types of people who are automating jobs away from the masses in all kinds of fields and industries would feel threatened by the point this article is trying to make. I love what webflow is trying to do and I really hope they accomplish it.<p>You're not special. You can be automated. I hope you are and I hope I am too. This is the future and I welcome it.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that every website needs a designer. One of the great things about the web is (or used to be) that anybody can publish on it. I hope there will eventually be a backlash to the "conspicuous design everywhere" trend.