Last night, I was thinking about how much the interface design and protoyping landscape has changed in the last decade. I started using Sketch and Marvelapp in 2014 when the predominant tools were Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop/Fireworks for UI, Balsamiq for low fidelity, Axure, Omnigraffle and Keynote for clickable prototypes. Some of these still exist today. While others like Antetype, Invision are no more.
I was taught to design on Photoshop at my first job. Even though, modern app stores had released three years earlier, websites was what we were designing back then. The Photoshop art boards we designed, would be ‘sliced’ and used in our HTML/CSS mockups. 'Redlining' was common practice for dev handovers. For personal projects and at hackathons, new age CSS/JS libraries like Twitter Bootstrap started being used. The designs I made back then are horrible and still exist in un-recoverable file formats (Okay, I actually found a photo of one design). Back then, I was a developer with an engineering degree working in a MNC IT company so I can’t blame myself for it.
When I was at Design school, using Adobe Illustrator for its vector capabilities became common place. We worked on information graphics and photoshop just didn’t cut it for our workflow. It was largely a skill problem since we had no teachers for our tools, whatever we did was with knowledge from the internet and our peers. Outside in the world, the industry was using tools like Axure, Omnigraffle and Keynote and Teehan+Lax had legendary status in their community for their annual release of their iOS kits.
By the time we graduated, there had been changes in this ecosystem. Sketch started picking up market share, smart phone penetration was trending up and collaboration became an important buzzword. It was 2014.
By the time, I started my internship, Material Design had launched and I upgraded from my ancient Sony Viao to a MacBook Air (on EMI). We adopted Sketch and Marvelapp at my workplace.
Back then, Sketch files were saved in Google Drive Shared Drives for archival and access across the team. You still needed a license to access proprietary content so we still needed to redline screens and share exports in folders. This lead to tools like Zeplin, Invision and Marvelapp coming in to fill this gap. The next year, Facebook released Origami built on top of Quartz Composer followed by Framer 1.0 in the next year. That was the start of making prototypes multi-dimensional and letting users “interact” with UI elements and granting access to device hardware sensors like camera. There were people that I knew making really cool stuff with this.
Next, Figma and Abstract started up trying to solve the file organization and collaboration problem in their own way; Figma’s USP was that it was browser based and hence could be used by non-mac users so great for budding designers who couldn’t afford a Mac. I didn't use Figma until Jan 2022.
Abstract targeted the existing Sketch user base and tried to introduce branching to the designer audience (albeit unsuccessfully?). Framer X built some hype but it didn’t catch on. I had beta access and building out a component system on Framer X(React) needed Dev support which most design teams didn’t have the luxury of. This (circa 2019) is when you started noticing design teams around the world having UX Engineers in their rosters. Design systems evolved out of style guides with the help of UX engineering and now we take design sytems to have both a design and code aspect to them along with voice, tone, illustrations, etc.
Then came the no-code/low-code revolution which simplified the ease of creation further and tools like Glideapps, Bubble and Landbot now make it easy for you to prototype and share ideas. And that brings us to 2024, where we are seeing the rise of AI assisted design and dev tools getting focus. These aren’t there yet but I wish with this we can sunset that beaten to death question of “Should designers code?”