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I'm still waiting for the generation of tools that are native to the medium—fluid, responsive, interactive, and aware of the final context for the design. So we don't start with static mockups that have to be converted, but rather build web-native from the beginning.

There are some promising moves that direction (such as responsive resizing in Sketch and projects to automatically convert sketch files to React components), but we're not there yet—most designers I know are still producing largely static designs that have to be put through development cycles.

And I know you can live design with HTML and CSS, skipping the static mockup phase. That's my preferred method at the moment, but I'm here to tell you it's still pretty slow and tedious and makes me long for better web design tooling.

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Honestly, I actually find it really really fast. I don't know how long you've been doing this and I suspect that may be the issue here, but for me it just comes so naturally now that I can't think of any other tool someone could use to outrun me using CSS/HTML.

More broadly, to me, that combo is one of the tools that makes me feel most connected to the output, as the results are near instantaneous.

Have you ever watched a good designer mockup something using Indesign, PowerPoint or a Wordpress Theme like Divi? They're superfast with the visual tools. I doubt you can match that in CSS/HTML.

There's a reason Visual Basic was so popular in the 90s. That sort of development kind of got forgotten when the web overtook everything. And it's why Alan Kay made Smalltalk a visual environment, and not just raw code in an editor, because human beings are faster designing UIs with visual tools.

18 years. I’m damn fast realizing design in code but will always be faster in visual media. I imagine your designs aren’t that complex? Simple pages do code up quick.

I could outrun you using Webflow...

I've worked on React Studio which tries to do exactly this:

https://reactstudio.com

One thing I've learned is that it's extremely hard to get designers to think about structure and hierarchies within a user interface. I don't see an easy solution.

Maybe machine learning that suggests reasonable structural transformations during the design process is the way? I know that Airbnb's design tool team (Jon Gold etc.) are exploring something along those lines.