I remember the first website I ever designed.
I used a visual web design tool.
Using a Corel program—yes, I just said Corel—I designed with a split screen, the visual editor being the larger of the split, leaving a sliver of code visible to learn a little HTML along the way.
My next brush with working on a website, I found myself in a similar situation. This time I was using Macromedia’s Dreamweaver 3. Again, I used a split view, primarily using the visual editor. When I began to dive into Fireworks’ slices and slick export features, I thought I had pretty much “arrived.”
Fast forward to today and I find myself taking a much different approach to website design, wrangling directly with the code.
Could there be a return to visual web design tools?
Macaw
Macaw is just that kind of tool, however, unlike some of the tools of ol’, Macaw claims to write “semantic HTML and remarkably succinct CSS.”
Instead of starting with Photoshop, Sketch or similar image editor to design a website, imagine starting with your favorite image editor and never moving to something else? That’s what Macaw is trying to do. It’s even engineered for fluid widths and responsive breakpoints. Through in some solid typography and scripting palette and you’ve got a compelling web design tool.
Here it is in action:
[tentblogger-vimeo 70771444]
“We wanted Macaw to write code you’d be proud enough to hand to developers. Current applications rely on trendy frameworks, export rigid positioning and generate ridiculous IDs. We think designers and developers deserve better. Macaw’s powerful, patent-pending engine is called Alchemy and it can do some incredible things.”
Strong words.
Macaw is compelling, and even though I can’t imagine not coding everything, I’m really curious about giving Macaw a try and seeing if it’s promising as it sounds.
What do you think?
Could a visual web design tool like Macaw change how websites are designed?
Drew Palko says
I’ve been experimenting with a similar web design tool called “Webflow”… The whole idea really intrigues me. Being much more of a designer than a developer, a lot of times I feel like I have to know the coding side of things to get my pages the way I want them to look. So while my knowledge of developing has grown, it would be so cool to be able to use a program like this, apply some basic developing knowledge for naming the layers, and be able to have some slick code that I didn’t have to spend hours to get!
The only difference I’ve seen with Webflow is that it’s browser based, so what you see when building is what it will actually look like. Here’s the web site for any who are interested: http://www.webflow.com/
Eric Dye says
Cool! Thanks for the info, Drew. I’ll have to take a look at this! 😀