Thanks for posting this Taylor!

I was inspired to write this after reading Modern Design Tools: Using Real Data and watching Bret Victor's amazing Inventing on Principle talk.

I hope the web designers out there who absolutely love hand-crafting code aren't offended by my words. My point is not that we need to replace coding altogether (90% of my day is spent writing code), but that we need to empower a lot more people to create the same type of things that code allows us to create.

We've done it before with most other creative disciplines, and we can do it with web design as well :)

Nearly every practitioner and thought leader seems to agree: “web designers should learn to code.”

God damn sigh. Here we go the f$%# again. I'm so done with this.

Can't thank you enough for posting this. Couldn't agree more.

I'm the creative director at a software company, and have been using Photoshop for the past 20 years. While I've grown accustomed to it's shortcomings for web design, I have no real alternatives for most of my daily work. It would take far to long to code what I can generally do in photoshop in mere moments. But since the dawn of responsive workflows etc, it's been weighing on me more and more. While i now have some very simple coding skills, what I've been (and I imagine most of my peers) looking for is something that allows us the design flexibility and speed of photoshop, but with responsive views...I'm happy to see I'm not alone.. What I've seen from the latest upcoming adobe product (comet i think) gives me some hope...as well as amazing apps like Webflow and Blocs....I think the future looks pretty bright :)

100% agree with the idea of breaking a site down into logical building blocks and working at that level with real data. Makes so much more sense than thinking of a website as a giant tree of divs. That would be like designing a 16 story building by drawing each brick one by one.

However, I'm not sure I like managing CSS in a giant GUI panel of ever-expanding CSS props. :/

Web design is so much more than just converting a static design to a working site.

Can we ban links to Medium articles?

The problem with stuff like this is that it's so complicated that just learning a little bit of CSS/HTML is waaaaay easier.

The fact that they taught me Weebly in design school should say something. It's buggy, (which is fine, it's software), and it's almost as complicated and hard to do as HTML/CSS.

When my wife had to learn how to make a website for school I showed her HTML/CSS in a couple of days and her response was "wow that's easy, why don't they always teach that to everyone?"

Not to ruin like your mission in life or anything but i think this is true.

I welcome diversity. Those who want to use these tools are welcome. They will not take other jobs. There will be people doing coding by hand and not a single kittie will be harmed by that too.

Nice webflow ad. It would be a nightmare to design in this UI (which is too much like a graphical css / html editor than a design tool). I hope Adobes Project Comet will solve this better.

I think tools of this nature will indeed be the future of webdesign. A lot of the "I use Sublime-text" stuff is to do with snobbery to be frank, just like the CLI purists of yesteryear.

I love Webflow and have a paid account. I hate the subscription model though, and the pricing. I'm hoping to jump over to Pinegrow if it gets good enough. That also has the advantage of being able to take benefit from the Wordpress ecosystem, which is a huge plus.