DEV Community

Cover image for The value of live web design

The value of live web design

Chen Hui Jing on March 05, 2024

Over the years, I’ve regularly seen blog posts or articles talking about “should designers code?” (less of “should developers learn design?” 🤷). I ...
Collapse
 
darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

We don't really have designers where I work; it's really just a bunch of developers with different skills and I tend to be the person to ask about any HTML/CSS stuff (sometimes JS stuff too), and from there the process is usually very similar.

I take a chair, sit down at my coworker's desk, and we start editing things live and trying what works; adding and removing elements, resizing the window, clicking through the application, etc.

This usually leads to problems being found quite early because testing on live data (or a copy thereof) in a real browser just exposes more problems than having only the "ideal" case with a reasonable number of elements on a normally sized screen.

Collapse
 
huijing profile image
Chen Hui Jing

i love your approach too. things proceed so much better further down the line if we test the ideas in the browser as early as possible

Collapse
 
bilalshabbir1 profile image
Bilal shabbir

Yes am web designer
Html CSS and bootstrap

Collapse
 
auroratide profile image
Timothy Foster

I use to work side-by-side with a designer editing CSS live to help realize their vision, and it was glorious; but for some reason things changed when stuff went fully remote, and it's been a lot harder to convince people that live pairing is worth it.

Collapse
 
huijing profile image
Chen Hui Jing

awww, that's a shame. does it feel very different through screen sharing?

Collapse
 
auroratide profile image
Timothy Foster

It does feel worse (at least to me), though not so much so that it isn't valuable to live pair remotely. The micro-lag between transactions, only being able to see one person's screen at a time, can't easily exchange control, etc. overall adds enough drag that it feels like it takes more energy to pair through a screen.