The last design file we handed to a client was in March 2021. It was beautiful, it was approved, and the site that shipped four months later did not look like it. Not because the engineers were careless. Because a static picture of a page cannot describe how the page behaves when the headline is two words longer, the screen is 380 pixels wide, or the image fails to load.
We now design in the browser from the second week of every project.
What the client sees
Instead of a board of screens, the client gets a URL. It works on their phone. The type is the real type, at the real size, with the real line breaks. The content is the content they wrote in Discovery, not Latin placeholder text, so the review is about whether the argument of the page holds.
Reviews got shorter and more useful. Nobody asks what happens on mobile, because they are holding it.
What changed for the engineers
Nothing is redrawn. The design review happens on the code that will ship, so the design phase produces components, tokens and a grid, not a specification of them. The engineering phase starts from a working front-end and adds the content model, the build pipeline and the hard parts.
We stopped writing the document that used to explain the spacing system to the engineers. The spacing system is a file, and the engineers wrote it with us.
What changed for the work
Designing in the browser makes some things harder. You cannot sketch ten layouts in an hour. You commit earlier.
We think that is a feature. The projects that go wrong are rarely the ones with too few options. They are the ones where a dozen directions were explored and none was pushed far enough to find its problems. Committing to one grid, one type system and one palette by the end of week two forces those problems out early, while they are cheap.
What we still draw
Identity work starts on paper and in vector tools, because a wordmark is not a web page. Illustration and photography are directed, not designed. And the first hour of every project is spent with a pencil, because the fastest way to find out that a layout does not work is to draw it badly.
Everything after that happens where the site will live.
