To quote Ryan Singer, author of Shape Up “every design file is destined for the trash.”
To take the notion even further, all (digital) products are designed for the trash.
Software is never done. For disciples of iterative development, current production software is just a prototype.
App > design files
Karri, co-founder of Linear (design poster child of 2023) shared how designers hack ideas over screenshots. There is a sense of liberation and creative destruction that happens when you embrace this approach. I first stumbled on this screenshot-hacking approach from this YouTube video.
Users do not care about your pixel-perfect drawings, design artefacts serve the role of communicating an idea. We do not live in the architect’s drawing of our building, we live in the building.
The design system movement feels partly powered by Figma. Naturally, they want stored value in their tool. Whilst useful to speed up the factory of design, it confuses designers into thinking making a beautiful design system is the point of design.
Note: I’m not against building reusable components. A component library feels like a nice balance between sensible defaults for speed and flexibility to design for the context of use. Consistent user interfaces are pleasant to use Aesthetic-usability effect.
High-fidelity, high risk
During ideation we are communicating an idea with users, during hand-off we are communicating ideas with engineers. tldraw is giving us a peek into a world where the barrier to idea communication is further reduced. Sketch to code in a couple of seconds with a canvas that is conducive to iteration.
In this world, could it be high-fidelity design that is bypassed? Bill Buxton, author of Sketching User Experiences advocates to stay as low fidelity as possible to encourage divergence of ideation. A concept I’m writing about to reinforce in my own practice. The moment we start manipulating objects that look like a final design is the moment we subconsciously lock ourselves in.
As our tooling evolves (humans shape tools, tools shape humans) so will our design and development practices.