Jason Santa Maria posted an amazing piece where he talks about his design process, compares web design applications and makes a wishlist for a better one. Please read it before going on.

For me, the most interesting debate in his article is also an old one: designing in the browser vs. designing with a desktop application. But Jason has a very interesting proposal for an hybrid app that would combine the best of both worlds.

I’m asking for something that sits on the fence between all of this. I don’t think any of the current desktop apps or any given browser gets the job done. […] So why not build a desktop app for web design around WebKit? […] an actual desktop application built with WebKit as the core to its display. It could have accurate rendering and previews for the way page elements would look, but with some of the WYSIWYG tools desktop design apps have.

This is an amazing idea, but I think it’s incredibly hard to achieve. I’m sure it will happen someday, but not in the near future. I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

Before this proposal, Jason complained about existing applications, and wrote about the problems he finds with the alternative at hand — designing in the browser.

By now you must be saying, “hey moron, just design in a browser!” Well, I half-agree with you. […] I’m more inclined to suggest the way forward probably lies with the help of a browser. But I don’t think the browser is enough. […] The imaginative process is cut short by the tools at hand; and it’s that imagination—or spark—at the beginning of a design that lays the path for everything that follows. Without it, you’re at best able to make a website that looks like a website—rather than a design that tells a story in the form of a website.

This was the part that appealed to me the most. Influenced by the work and writing of Andy Clarke, I mostly use the browser when I do any web design work. I find it very natural, I love using selectors to set global colors or typefaces, designing with web fonts and having true browser type rendering.

However, I feel that Jason is on spot here. During the design of The Pilcrow, I used the browser, but sometimes I really felt the constraints of my choice. When I suddenly wanted to try a radically different thing but I didn’t want to code a lot of CSS just for that. When I wanted to use a color picker and instantly see the background color of some element change, but I couldn’t. It was annoying, and it undoubtedly influenced the final design.

As Jason concluded, there’s no silver bullet. But on my next project I’ll be giving him the benefit of the doubt, and trying a little more Fireworks before I move to the browser. It can’t hurt.