[news_to_me]

> Right now when I want something to look a particular way, I go into a CSS file, guess...

This is what I used to do, before I started really getting into web design. Then I discovered Sketch, which really changed the way I think about it.

When you design with CSS, you're also constantly struggling with responsiveness, HTML structure, and a bunch of little things that are sort of irrelevant to how it looks.

Sketch (and similar apps) let you focus just on the look, which is great. Need a div with a background color? Stick a rect right there. It really helped me get into the flow of "designing" instead of "building".

(Also, this design blog really helped me get started, coming from a web developer's perspective: http://learnui.design/blog/)

[fabricexpert]

The problem with this approach is that you get nice screenshots that look great, but the implementation doesn't always match up. Sometimes that last 5-10% of the design that was so easy in Sketch is a complete pain to implement correctly, and it gets skipped. You end up with a half-baked implementation that doesn't look quite right.

[news_to_me]

That's fair, but if you're also a developer I think it's pretty easy to keep a "how hard would this be to implement?" in the back of your head. And of course, design/development is a process.

I'd argue that getting most of those development details mostly out of your head is well worth the creative freedom it affords.

[otras]

One way I've sped up my work with Sketch has been the Zeplin plugin [0], which auto-generates CSS stylings for a page designed in Sketch. In my experience, getting a Sketch file from a designer and using Zeplin makes it very easy to translate into proper CSS.

[0]: https://zeplin.io/