DALL-E2s interpretation of: Designer designing in the browser, mid century style, kodak chrome

I nearly missed this article by Matthias Ott - The New CSS:

CSS is now the most powerful design tool for the Web.
Want to emulate and confidently design a layout that leverages the potential of CSS Grid in any of the major design tools like Figma, Adobe XD, or Sketch? Not possible. Want to define a color in one of the wide gamut color spaces like OKLCH, which result in more vibrant and natural colors on modern screens, maybe by using a color picker? Not possible. You want to simulate fluid typography that dynamically scales font sizes based on the viewport or container size and also define minimum and maximum values like you can do it in CSS with clamp()? Not possible. Or how about defining a fallback font in case your web font doesn’t load? Good luck using any screen design tool on the market. Not only are all of those things – very clearly – important design decisions, but they are also easily possible with just a few lines of CSS. In this new era of CSS, the design tools are now the limiting factor.

Hear hear!

Using graphic design / layout tools to 'design' user interfaces is a misconception. Those tools are wonderful to create artifacts to get into the discussion how a website may 'look', and to a lesser extend how it 'behaves'. But often those 'pictures of websites' are treated as the single source of truth and the blueprint for the web site to come. Ultimately it is the browser and its capabilities that is responsible to carry these ideas over to the user. So to me it is imperative that the design work has to be done in the browser as early as possible. And now, as Matthias stated, it is not only because of the perceived (design) limitations of the web technologies, but quite the contrary - modern CSS has evolved to a point where things are possible that cannot be shown in graphic design tools.

And yet, every time I state that I'm designing in the browser I get the odd looks.
I know that out there are many people like me, who have a strong foundation in graphic design, but decided to get deeper into the 'coding' side, aka understand HTML, CSS, JS and use that to create stuff. You know, the 'web designers' that now are non-existant, because neither 'UX Design' or 'Front-End-Developer' or whatever the industry is looking for fits their skill set.

I hope that now finally the time has come to accept this special creed of designers and to reintroduce 'web design' as a craft in its own right. <✊/>

Article image: Me, and DALL-E2: “Designer designing in the browser, mid century style, kodak chrome”