The handoff is dying, and I want to write its obituary honestly, because I don't miss it, and that surprises me.
For my whole career there was a wall. On one side, designers made pictures. On the other, developers built things. And between them, a ritual. You exported. You annotated. You wrote a document explaining what the picture meant. You emailed it, then you waited, and then you found out what had actually been built.
The wall was where quality quietly went. Not through anyone's fault. Through translation. Every measurement re-measured by eye, every intention re-read, every subtlety rounded to the nearest easy thing, because the person building it had a deadline and a picture and no way to ask what I meant at eleven at night.
Now the file lives in a browser, and everyone is inside it at once. The developer doesn't receive my intention secondhand. They inspect it. The client doesn't wait for a presentation. They watch. There's no final version, because there's no version, only the thing, changing.
What surprises me is the psychological effect more than the technical one. When people can see the work while it's still ugly, they stop treating design as a trick performed offstage. That's uncomfortable for a certain kind of designer, the one who wants the reveal, and I have some of that in me.
But the reveal was never quite honest. It made us feel like artists, and I think it made the work a little worse. Design done in the open has to be right rather than merely impressive, and that's a trade I'll take.