[golergka]

It seems that author advocates for design tools to become more and more like developer tools - a notion that I, as a developer, can totally get behind.

However, in my 12 years of experience in game development, many people who are world-class designers and artists don't have the same mental model as developers. There are a lot of "technical art" issues that in the end, you'd rather handle on a developer's side. I just don't think that a person who spends his time thinking about character's emotion, colour balance, human anatomy and other art-related issues is in the same mind space to think about technical issues like which UI containers should be scaled on what rules (full-screen or safe area? hugging the screen outside or inside?) for different screen sizes, how things should be composed from layers and animated, how assets can be converted from a static image to a resizable one, how a giant image can be cut into a 9-slice (or in a more complicated way) to save texture budget, how can we reuse already existing assets without importing another image that is very, very similar, how different kind of gradients behave with not-pixel-perfect scaling and crunch compression (and I didn't even go into 3d!). I tried empowering designers and artists so they would make these decisions, but they hated it and were miserable - so in the end I'd rather get a static, single-sized PSD and do all that work myself.

All of this, of course, are just my 2 cents from a specific industry and with a very specific kind of people in mind - I'm not trying to impose these views on any designers and artists who want to get into the technical art side and would be thrilled to see more and more individuals who can be productive and happy in this kind of hybrid role. But as a matter of fact, these people are very, very rare and we shouldn't expect most artists to be like that.

[parksy]

Kind of agree (as a developer who appreciates art) - right now we're constraining ourselves to grid-based layouts. Having been in web professionally for 15 years and recreationally for 25 years, I've seen UI conventions change a lot as technology, form factors and global design trends change.

So modern tools like sketch work for grids, mobile responsive, yada yada which is much better than using photoshop as the design sits closer to the canvas it will be rendered on. As a developer, yay that works great for me! And also it's a huge middle finger to those designers who just built stupid impossible pointless UIs in the 90s and 2000s.

But it's also very constraining for the designer, especially given how far standards have come, and it's almost a given that someone is going to come along and Bauhaus the shit out of UI.

I really enjoyed the challenge of implementing a truly creative design on the web, but there has been a general convergence towards a convenient middle point where the designs are constrained by development requirements, at least in the way the tools are geared.

That's not to say a great artist can't create something amazing but if we have to teach all our creatives that they must conform to this particular way of thinking, then we're cutting the industry short in a bad way I think.

I guess the next thing will be a sass or js library called bauhaus.js. Or is that just DOM + CSS?

[HeWhoLurksLate]

> it's almost a given that someone is going to come along and Bauhaus the shit out of UI.

I nearly fell out of my chair of laughter when I read that.

Out of curiosity, do you mean this in a positive or a negative way?

[lucideer]

I think you're right, but I think the motivation for a lot of posts like this are rooted in developers working with designers who believe "issues like which UI containers should be scaled on what rules (full-screen or safe area? hugging the screen outside or inside?) for different screen sizes" should be within their domain of influence.

That separation of responsibilities is always a tough line to define in reality, and I do agree that the tools used by whomever is assuming that role should become more like developer tools.

[nkrisc]

I see where you're coming from but I disagree on a few points. I work as a UX designer, designing web UI. I should understand and consider how the design will flex when the browser is resized (and understand what's possible). I have a good understanding of what will be trivial to implement versus what will require an extra week of development for little gain. I need to understand how the web works so I can think about how the site will work on a bad connection, how it will work when the request times out, how the data that powers the site is shaped and the implications of that.

The web is my medium and how can I effectively design for the entire experience (not just how it looks) if I don't understand how the web fundamentally works?

[golergka]

I don't think that we really have something to disagree on here. Web and app designers like you are more technically and design-oriented; however, I'm talking about game development, where these roles require much more pure "art" skills: you don't use simple material design here, you actually draw all the real-looking materials (in the artistic style of the whole project) and characters and every little shiny detail.

[nkrisc]

Perhaps I misinterpreted your comment then. But all the same, my work is not simply applying material design to websites. We're creating our own branding and "art", but still we have to distill that down into something that can actually be implemented by a developer. Early on we do all kinds of crazy stuff but we always have to be thinking about how we'll bring it back down to Earth and how it will be used and experienced.

[xsmasher]

A UX designer or UI artist should absolutely be concerned with these things. Every UI artist I know has asked "How do I do 9-slicing?" on day one.

I try to put as much power in the hands of the UI artist; if they have full control and an accurate preview (or better yet, WYSIWYG) then they can iterate on the screens without my involvement, and turn in something beautiful that I just need to connect to the actions / data sources.

> a person who spends his time thinking about character's emotion, colour balance, human anatomy and other art-related issues Non Sequitur. Those are character artist concerns, not UI/UX artist concerns.