Professional web designers in Singapore and the world over have remained behind the scenes while the web programmers have been handsomely rewarded.
Designers have for the majority of the 25 years that the internet has been around faced tremendous struggles due to lack of a variety of design tools and slow-moving standards. However, for the next 25 years of the internet’s existence, designers will rule the web.
The Progress Paradox
Most professional web designers in Singapore started designing using Dreamweaver a few years back. However, for an aspiring web designer, it is a much more difficult challenge.
Despite web browser becoming more predictable and standardised, designing for web browsers has a much harder learning curve. This is in light to the fact that CSS and HTML have grown to staggering proportions and JavaScript has become a crucial component for most apps and websites.
It is a good thing that we have many tools built to enhance the web design workflow, but a majority of them remain code-based. They also require users to have a significant level of text editor mastery, which many aspiring professional website designers in Singapore lack. This creates a paradox of choice and this leads to most of these would be designers to give up on their dream.
On top of this, mobile devices have made the web designer job much more difficult. Unlike in the past where designers would use a fixed width canvas, they now have to ensure that their designs are adjustable to reflow for devices with different resolutions.
More so, professional web designers in Singapore have to consider media queries, network speeds, progressive enhancement, browser quirks and so much more. The bottom line here is that it does not help that the solution to these problems lies in code libraries.
The progress paradox in this sense is visible in that the internet continues to make significant strides into the future, yet it is much more difficult to harness its power because most people do not know how to code and use text editors.
Arrested Development
All the progress we are seeing on the internet today is web development based, with near zero progress made in the visual web design tools in the last decade. While Dreamweaver was a good starting point for many of the professional web designers in Singapore, its acquisition by Adobe has more or less made it worse.
Many of the web design tools worth a mention today are coding oriented, and there seems to be an assumption that code is the only way that we can create and design for the web. For close to two decades, professional web designers in Singapore have worked with tools such as Illustrator and Photoshop. While print designers use tools such as InDesign.
3D Printing designers, on the other hand, have specialised modelling and animation software, which they can manipulate directly. For professional website designers in Singapore and across the world, we have to contend with relying on programmers to translate designs into a working solution or learn how to code.
Instead of having direct access to a comprehensive website design ecosystem, we are come up with designs by piecing together different code snippets, pre-processors, and frameworks. For this reason, professional website designers in Singapore feel overwhelmed, and it is one of the reasons for high web design prices. The only solution to this arrested development is for us to build the design tools ourselves.
An Ideal Web Design Tool
The ideal web design tool ought to fit the interactive web medium, and it should give designers the freedom to manipulate the canvas. The tool should be free of any coding. Essentially, the ideal web design tool should create actual visual abstractions centred on common web programming primitives.
The ideal web design tool should be able to do the following
- Give designers the freedom to create dynamic data as well as seamlessly inject it into layouts and designs
- Make it possible to specify user interactions without relying on jQuery scripts
- Empower designers to develop reusable components and flexible style systems
The web design tool should enable professional website designers in Singapore to do all the above without resorting to coding and programming. Ideally, this web design tool should help designers focus on the essential aspects of web designs such as usability, aesthetics, data, and interactions by transcending the specifics of code and implementation.
It is Impossible to Automate Web Design
Web design trends are constantly changing, and it is adapting to new platforms, ideas, and environments. In all aspects, web design is more human than web programming. This is because anyone can tell between good and bad design while only a few people can tell the difference between good and bad code.
Web design is like fine art or great literature, in the sense that it relies on human emotion and empathy. The design of a solution is more important than the implementation since the latter is largely invisible to the eye and can take on different permutations. For this reason, web design cannot be automated, and if that will be possible soon, we might as well automate humanity.
Without a doubt, web design is the common factor behind a majority of the experiences and content on the web. However, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript is still the foundation of creating the web. Despite being around for 25 years, the web design possibilities available for the internet are still yet to be fully tapped.
Trail Blazing a Better Web
If we are to have an inclusive web, we must empower more people with less technical tools. Consequently, the capabilities and needs of the internet will grow faster than schools can train programmers.
For this reason, the only choice left is to transcend past computer programming and start interacting with ideal web design tools.
Conclusion
If we face out the current technical barriers, we can usher in a creative renaissance on the internet today. Contrary to the current situation, professional web designers in Singapore will not be relegated to conjuring and creating wireframe ideas; they will have the chance to bring these ideas to life once they have the proper tools.
Professional website designers in Singapore and the world over are the future of the web. Contact us today for professional web design services today.
