Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of customer-obsession mantra and data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony.
You just handed off a major redesign. Three months of research, twenty-seven major revisions, and hundreds cups of coffee have all culminated in this pinnacle of glory. It’s finally done!
Except it’s not.
It’s not, even after you have answered every single question the developers have about your red-line.
It’s not, even after you have addressed all the technical constraints developers encountered during the implementation.
It’s not, even after you meticulously documented all the patterns and styles into a library for reference and reuse.
It’s not, because neither you nor the developers have talked to a real user. At the bottom of your heart, you are secretly wishing:
My design looks great on paper, so let’s keep it on paper.
A few people have asked me what I did to make this [website] so fast.
The answer is: nothing.
I just didn't add anything to make it slow.
I kept it simple.
The pages are pre-rendered.
The CSS is inlined.
I didn't add unnecessary javascript.
The work was done before you got there.
Your websites start fast until you add too much to make them slow. Do you need any framework at all? Could you do what you want natively in the browser? Would doing it without a framework at all make your site lighter, or actually heavier in the long run as you create or optimize what others have already done?