[slopinthebag]

I mean, it's fine and serves it's purpose, but I'm a bit confused what you are getting that you wouldn't get with the millions of pre-made designs and design systems? Like Tailwind UI for example.

https://tailwindcss.com/plus/ui-blocks

[apsurd]

I find that with the ubiquity of Tailwind, developers treat design as a "solved problem". What's missing is the specific evolution of one's product and the resultant information architecture. The sibling response is my experience as well, design is an incredibly interactive exercise.

Granted, not every component on every surface will need this amount of scrutiny. But I'm usually the outlier developer warning teammates that design is not a solved problem. Granted, there's a huge difference between an existing app and its evolution and throwing a nextjs landing page up in search of any life.

[skydhash]

Even with bootstrap, design was a solved problem. What you bring with a UI designer is appeal (aka make thing pretty and enjoyable). If you want utilitarian, even the old x11 toolkit like Athena, Win 98 era widgets would do the part.

[apsurd]

This is just completely false. But I have a feeling there's no way you're going to change your mind.

"make things pretty" would be a graphic designer or artist. Are you saying the entire arm of Product design is a made up value?

[skydhash]

I wouldn’t, but you’re not much of a product designer if you can’t get your ideas across using simple tools like a sketch on a whiteboard (there was|is an app the let you take photos and link them using active areas).

So you can take bootstrap (or even raw html) and create something useful. Then you make it nice, not the other way around.

You would have to be a big outlier to feel the need to create a custom widget. Most widgets have been defined since decades.

[apsurd]

I agree that design is about primitives. wireframes and IA should come across clearly at any fidelity.

But i don't think that's what tailwind and bootstrap are doing. But people very much use these tools to "solve design".

The layouts, widgets, and primitives in these tools are not primitives. I can't deny they get tons of people very far very fast. But my main disagreement is that all of this isn't design and it's not what designers do. You touched on what i agree with: UX flows, diagrams, stories, journeys, personas, etc, these all need to be designed and connected in reality using various primitives for the medium.

Then you slap a cohesive paint job on it, interaction elements, tone and terminology and yes, there is that element of design too.

[gopher_space]

> So you can take bootstrap (or even raw html) and create something useful. Then you make it nice, not the other way around.

Design with a capital D is a completely different realm than whatever you’re talking about. Not even in the same ballpark.

[adriand]

Iterative experience (experimenting with different ideas, deciding what works best) and speed of execution (once I was happy with it, making it happen required almost no work).

[slopinthebag]

Thats fair. Could you have the same iterative experience with an LLM, but starting with a prebuilt base and iterating from there?

[throwaway7783]

Yes. Even without Claude design and just Claude code, it can use existing design and build out new mockups in-app, which is much easier to demo , tweak and then implement the backend (if any) - all through Claude Code (or Codex if you prefer that). We use both and are now leaning more towards Codex over Claude