In recent years, web development has become a visual process. But let's talk about how we got here. It all started with Adobe Photoshop 1.0, back in 1990. At the time the platform was only available on Macintosh, and was developed by brothers Thomas and John Knoll as a photo editing tool. Photoshop quickly became the industry standard for digital color editing. Fast-forward to 2001, when Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), based on the XML markup language, gained support from all popular browsers for displaying vector graphics on web pages. In December of 2001, Audi was among the first to introduce a website that changed its layout based on the size of the browser. Later this would be known as responsive design.
Fast forward to 2021, a time when companies have finally figured out how to package up responsive design as a good that is sold via SAAS model. These design platforms have made it incredibly easy to deploy content to the web in a matter of minutes, not days.
The leaders in this space are Figma and Webflow. Figma is a sandbox for creators and allows exporting as code. Teams in fast paced mobile development operations export the entire application code base every sprint cycle. Imagine the ease of change management! And the ease of iteration on design elements / patterns. With a design system in Figma, you can define template assets, variants of those assets, and apply the concept of inheritance to virtually anything.
Webflow, though focused specifically on web, has some default inheritance and other behaviors that makes building advanced (I mean like, really advanced) websites a walk in the park. This is not your average website builder. It is the ultimate sandbox and a visual designer's best friend, becasue it gives you development powers. Marketers love it because the process of publishing content is streamlined with a platform that feels more like iMovie than Wordpress.
Visual development has unbounded potential for guiding the creative through the development process, allowing product teams to accelerate time to market like never before. One key strategy is to always look at the tools that well funded startups are adopting. With an enormous buying power also comes solid research and knowing the right people. Behind the right people are the right products. And choosing the right products to build with - makes all the difference.
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