[agedclock]

> Once upon a time, design and code worked as one. Web designers would imagine beautiful designs and turn them into beautiful websites with HTML and CSS.

This was never the case and in fact a rewriting of history. My first "proper" job in web development was taking a PSD from a designer and turning that into a XHTML template. Quite a lot of the time the designs looked nice in Photoshop but were almost impossible to implement (at least in CSS 2).

I've worked in several since then and most were using Photoshop to create designs or design guidelines to pass over the developers. I used to "cut up the design" and then implement into XHTML template and controls. This was pretty much the norm everywhere if the company cared about how the website / webapp looked.

There were some frontend designer types that would write code, but I've met actually two of them during my career as a dev that was heavily front-end focused until 2023.

[XenophileJKO]

Well it was certainly true in many places. I was doing both roles designing and coding. I even had the title of "Webmaster" at the time.

I had to do work in Photoshop (or usually Macromedia Fireworks), and then code it up in Cold Fusion.

[Arainach]

It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good.

Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple.

I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.

[agedclock]

> It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good.

So someone wrote a bunch of server code (backend) and then handed off for someone to style the frontend. This is what happens now in most teams. The person styling the frontend was never referred to as a "designer".

> Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple.

I am aware. However that isn't the norm in most places. What happens is that the best dev that can style stuff is lumbered with doing all the frontend work and most of their colleagues don't understand it.

Larger orgs have dedicated frontend/backend teams.

> I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.

This are actually simpler than they were back then and there is better separate between the frontend and backend. So it actually easier IMO.

[AndreasMoeller]

You might have seen different titles where you worked, but generally the term web designers was broadly used to refer to people using HTML & CSS.

The term frontend developer didn't really exists back then because allmost all the logic code was on the server.

[agedclock]

I have never heard the term designer used to describe anyone doing anything else other than creating PSD mockup and later on wire-frames.

I have worked in large corps and smaller agencies as a full stack / front-end dev for about 18 years.

This wasn't just the case in my part of the world. There were prominent online publication that were extolling the virtues of designers embracing creating their designs in CSS and HTML and moving away from using Photoshop.

[AndreasMoeller]

What so what are you trying to say?

First you say that you have never herd of designers working with HTML and CSS and then you say that prominent online publications were advertising it?

[agedclock]

No. I didn't think what I said was that difficult to understand. But I will break it down.

- Designers were not working with HTML and CSS (this was about ~2008-2011). I met one "designer" who would do HTML and CSS back in about 2015. I met another woman that could do it in 2022. I've worked in a bunch of web agencies and corps.

- Some designers due to emergence of smart phones had started experimenting with using HTML 5 and CSS 3 to create responsive designed.

- There were articles in online publications and blogs where people were extolling the virtues of it, trying to convince others.

- This ultimately didn't happen. People are still using Photoshop if they are not using Figma. You have dedicated front-end devs and/or teams in most orgs if they actually care about the UX/UI quality. Otherwise they just just use a bootstrap/tailwind theme and call it a day.

I stopped doing frontend dev primarily back in 2023 after I realised I was still fixing the same stupid iOS bugs from a decade before hand.

[jinushaun]

Seriously. Talk about revisionist history. The web dev workflow before Figma was awful. It never “worked as one”.

I love Figma’s dev mode. Saves me and the designer time from measuring sizes and eyedropping colors. Figma also allows me to export assets myself instead of waiting for the designer to do it, or do it myself poorly from Photoshop.

The relationship between design and dev is much more collaborative now. It was downright hostile pre-Figma with photoshop and illustrator files. Nevermind versioning, sharing and comments…

[AndreasMoeller]

Figma dev mode is definitely better than a PSD file, but it is still a terrible hand off process.

I wasn't arguing that the handoff was ever good. I was saying when the person designing the UI also wrote the CSS you didn't need a handoff

[apercu]

Man, I started building websites and doing CGI coding in 1994 and 1995, which makes me a very early web developer and I don't remember this time at all.

In fact, I stopped coding as a job when it became expected that I would do back end database & business logic stuff AND fiddle with front-end code to make it work/look the same in 3 very different browsers, and update the code each time (I'm looking at you Microsoft) a browser vendor would do something stoopid.

[agedclock]

I am talking about the 2005-2015 era of web development.

[apercu]

Ah. I was managing teams of developers by then, and most of them had some front end skills, but we still needed dedicated people to deal with... I almost said "edge cases" but since they impacted every single project I guess they were not "edge cases".

[agedclock]

I was still working on Safari Compatibility in 2023. The bugs I was fixing in both CSS and JS were present in the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4. I was utterly fed up of fixing the same stupid issues and decided to look for a more backend focused position. Unfortunately I am now working with AWS which has it own set of headaches.

[apercu]

Seems to be unavoidable in in the era of "move fast and break things" coupled with "let's make it proprietary so we don't have to defend our space with innovation" and incentives for staff to release features we didn't ask for nor want.

[agedclock]

Apple do this so PWA / Web Apps work poorly on their platform and pushes people to the App Store. It is why I no longer have an Apple Phone.

Running things on AWS is just foolish IMO. You data is locked and infra is locked into their platform.

[AndreasMoeller]

I am not saying that it was the same at every company and your personal experience may be different.

This was absolutely the norm at a lot of companies. It was very normal for the developers to work in either PHP or Ruby on Rails and the designers wrote CSS.

It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.

[agedclock]

It was never the norm. I've worked as a contractor/consultant in a lot of places and I saw two people that were "designers" that could write HTML and CSS. That is two people in 18 years.

> It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.

None of these people knew CSS at all. I am talking pre-2012. Bootstrap version 1 or 2 was out at the time and 960 grid css was only out a few years before.

[mcny]

You are a better person than me. I would have taken the PSD, export as jpeg, add some alt text and slap that as the web page

[pavlov]

That's how we used to do it with the <map> element back in 1995 and the Netscape 2.0 days...

And of course that abomination of a HTML tag still works:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

[agedclock]

It has some good uses. Like you can have a picture of a map and annotate it with a <map>.

[AndreasMoeller]

Yeah! Image maps FTW! 1995 was a crazy year for the web

[porridgeraisin]

What the hell, never heard of that tag before. And I used to scroll through MDN for fun.

[thehappypm]

And don’t forget to stretch the aspect ratio while you’re at it

[aaronblohowiak]

with flash, it was more prevalent iirc

[apercu]

I think with maybe Flash 4? That's when we started pushing the envelope and some of our back end developers started working in Flash.

I was procedural programmer (came from Sysadmin - shell and perl) and I had zero desire to learn the whole timeline approach to actions (my memory is fuzzy) but I would give them endpoints to call server side!

[AndreasMoeller]

Yes Flash gave everyone a taste of what the workflow could be.