My job is simply to design gadgets that I like Inventors are people who not only curse, but who also start to think of what can be done to eliminate the bother...When I see something that I don't like, I try to invent a way around it. My job is simply to design gadgets that I like. Jacob Rabinow, The Evolution of Useful Things The iPodYou and your user are one innovation
Can't developers just see? We designers love artboards. From rough UI sketches to high fidelity mockups, we see ourselves as visual artists expressing ideas on artboards that have a pre-defined width and height. To start a new project, we declare the size of the artboard in the first step. What about responsive design? Not a problem! We diligently design on three artboards — one for mobile, one for tablet, and one for desktop — with content elegantly adapting, scaling, reflowing, reordering, and reprioritizing. We proudly hand off the artboards to developers while patting ourselves on the back: this is how responsive design should be done. After weeks of arduous engineering, the product finally comes out. We find, to our great dismay, that some copy is hanging off the grid, the focal point of the hero image has been cropped out, the font sizes don’t even come close to the type ramp. What went wrong? Can’t the developers just see everything on all those artboards? Nope. Chuánqí Sun, Beyond Artboards Start drawing, then put the box around it