Designers and developers are divided by tools that speak different languages. It creates friction, hand-offs, and limits creativity. It is time we change that.
Andreas Møller September 30, 2025
Once upon a time, design and code worked as one. Web designers would imagine beautiful designs and turn them into beautiful websites with HTML and CSS. As the web grew both in use and capability, companies started offering software services built entirely on the web. These companies needed more and more software to be built and more and more people to build it. They started sorting people under the names “Designer” and “Developer”, so they were easy to organize. Designers would go into a design team and draw user interfaces. Developers would go into a dev team and write code. And thus, the hand-off was born.
In the years to come, the divide grew stronger. Designers stopped writing CSS and withdrew to vector drawing tools like Figma. Developers started adopting web frameworks with increasingly complex build systems, making it ever more difficult for designers to contribute. And so, the hand-off grew stronger and darkness spread across the land.
Today, it is common for companies to have cross-functional product teams that combine both designers and developers, but they still work in separate tools and rely hesitantly on the dreaded hand-off.
Treating the symptom
Through the years there have been several attempts and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on trying to fix the hand-off. Despite this, we are no closer to solving the problem than we were 10 years ago. But, the hand-off is a symptom, not the disease. The real problem in this industry is the split we have created between “Designer” and “Developer”.
Where developers have HTML and CSS, designers have layers and style. Developers say “background”, designers say “fill”. Developers use flexbox, designers use auto-layout. The differences are tiny but just big enough to ensure there is friction. The hand-off is just a symptom of the larger issue: designers and developers speak entirely different languages.
A smaller and smaller box
When designers were kicked out of the codebase and found a new home in Figma, their roles slowly started to change. Instead of building user interfaces they created Figma designs. Instead of sharing links to websites they had built, they shared images on Dribbble and Behance. Designers became UI designers focusing more and more on the visual aspect of design and less on its function. Much of the functional aspects of design, such as interactions and accessibility, were left to the developers to figure out.
As the web evolved and CSS became more powerful, the gap between CSS and design tools grew. CSS now lets developers build responsive layouts using different layout modes, functions, and an ever-increasing number of relative units. Design tools still rely on pixels. Over time, more responsibility was moved to the developer, and the box that designers had been put in grew smaller.
Creativity withered
In the beginning CSS was very limited in scope, and designers often had to adjust their expectations to align with what could be implemented on the web. Today we face the opposite problem: CSS has far outgrown the capabilities of design tools like Figma in areas such as layout, animations, and especially interactivity. Even when it comes to colors and gradients, Figma is far outmatched by the capabilities of modern CSS.
Designers today are limited not by the platform, but by tools and processes.
Great design happens when you take good design and iterate.
Tools are not the only culprit. Any process with as much friction as the design hand-off will slowly kill creativity. When even the most trivial design fix requires you to create a Jira ticket for a developer, the easiest way is just to let it slide.
Great design happens when you take good design and iterate, but if the process for iteration is slow and cumbersome, then you never get there. For great design to happen people must be free to iterate, experiment and play: unburdened by tools and processes.
We wanted more
Some companies have addressed this by only hiring designers who can code. However, code was never a great medium for design.
The Nordcraft editor is built entirely in Nordcraft so we get to experience the benefits every day.
We started Nordcraft because we were not satisfied with the tools and processes that most software teams use today. We wanted a new set of tools that bring design and development together, instead of separating them. We wanted tools that are built on top of HTML and CSS that can take full advantage of the web platform, but with visual interfaces that enable rapid iteration and experimentation. Instead of being for designers or for developers, Nordcraft is for building websites and web applications. It does not dictate what roles you have, or who should do what. In Nordcraft, each team can draw their own lines and divide responsibilities as they see fit.
At Nordcraft we have brilliant designers who are more than capable of understanding most of the logic behind the product we are building. Likewise, we have engineers with a keen eye for design. Instead of putting people in boxes labelled “Designer” or “Developer”, we lean into the strengths of each team member, and complement each other when necessary. The Nordcraft editor is built entirely in Nordcraft so we get to experience these benefits every day. After working this way for three years it is hard to imagine ever going back.
For so many years we have been held back by the tools and processes that were the standard of the day. We spoke loftily about agility and the awfulness of waterfall, while picking up tickets from designers and passing them down the assembly line to a QA.
It is time for something new.