Item — HN Reader

@kevinsync's answer is 100% correct and it's been this way for the last ~~~20? years? at least - only it was "Photoshop files hold the (design) truth" before - now it's figma.

But yes, the "design to code" gap has always been where designers' intentions were butchered and/or where frontend developers would discover/have to deal with designs that didn't take into account that some strings need more space, or what to do when there are more or less elements in a component, how things should scroll in real life, how things should react to a variety of screen sizes, etc.

this short meme video is funny/not funny because it hits too close to home - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r6JXc4zfWw4 - but yes, "designers don't code and developers don't design", roughly speaking

and then of course you meet some people who do both really well... but they are pretty rare. :-)

3 comments

It's a real shame that people bought into this false dichotomy, because the base reality is that people who work in web dev that stubbornly pick either code or layout are more of a liability than an asset.

I don't believe that people who can design and code are as rare as folks seem to believe, either. What seems more likely is that there are a LOT of coders who are extremely fluent in CSS but aren't particularly gifted when it comes to making things look good.

It wasn't that long ago that designers understood that they couldn't just hand off a 2D comp of what they want to see. The job isn't done until the output can be integrated into the app. Nobody gets to launch cows over the wall and go for lunch.

> only it was "Photoshop files hold the (design) truth" before

You mean Fireworks. Photoshop was for graphic design. Web designers used Adobe Fireworks. Figma is a successor to Fireworks, not Photoshop.

Nah yeah Photoshop .PSD's were totally normal for website designs. I got extremely proficient at building functioning websites based on PSD files, going back as far as the days of using nested <table> structures with 1x1 transparent spacer.gif images :) I built hundreds of websites from .PSD files, and Fireworks was pretty much non-existent in my experience.

Yeah +1, at the start of my career (mid 2000s) all the web designs were done in Photoshop. I think this was true until 2010/11 at least, when I first encountered Axure being used for some design stuff. I’ve never used Fireworks and never saw it in the wild (UK, in case it was a regional thing)

Those days aren’t over. HN uses nested tables with 1x1 transparent spacer.gif images.

I like that HN’s design is timeless. It’s a shame people usually ignore it, or are critical of it.

The text is barely legible, and you can hardly ever click on the actual target you want (e.g. upvote vs downvote).

It's timeless in that it was never good to begin with, it is just actively malicious now for anyone using it from a touch interface.

> It's timeless in that it was never good to begin with

True but it shows that good design doesn't matter.

Also: Craigslist, Reddit, LinkedIn...the list goes on.

I was in web agencies since like 2002-2015, always got PSDs from either clients or internal designers

100%. I was always told to slice the PSD, fireworks never entered the conversation in the agency world I was a part of.

Sure, and also Illustrator sometimes, and Photoshop at other times. Some of the designers I know (very famous for their ui/web work) never touched vector components and just had a ton of layers in Photoshop and air/paintbrushed everything. Hence the meme...

I've even received designs in PowerPoint

Everyone used whatever they were familiar with regardless of the purpose of the application.

Many designers stuck with Photoshop sadly. Back when I did agency work it was absolutely normal to get PSDs of mockups.

I've seen the front end devs get PSD files as recently as 2021.

I think his point was made regardless of his mistake

I wouldn't even classify it as a mistake, just a difference in experience regardless of what Adobe's intentions were.

As someone who has done front-end development for both web and mobile devices for a very long time in the pre-Figma days I was handed a lot more designs that were mocked up in Photoshop than Fireworks.

It’s just one more example of people realizing that the code is the spec.