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MK: You have this crossover skillset of designer and developer which I’m seeing a lot more in the industry, any advice for designers who also want to cross-pollinate? 

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CM: Early in my design career, I found a specific passion for designing web and other interactive experiences. Naturally, my curiosity kept going into wondering how to build the experiences I designed into something real.

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There’s never been a better time for Designers interested in UI/UX, Web, Digital, etc. design to also jump into learning and building their ideas. From tools like Webflow and Framer that enable a more visual way to build websites akin to design tools like Figma, to the age of AI we are living in where you can code nearly an entire site or app entirely through prompts, there is a vast amount of opportunity to jump in.

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Additionally, adding some development skills to your experience will only help you further stand out in the market when looking for clients or open roles. Especially with startups and tech where teams are agile and moving fast, a Designer that can not only design assets and the site, but also build and maintain it is incredibly valuable.

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MK: What’s one of the most challenging and rewarding projects you’ve worked on as a designer and why? 

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CM: While there are a few that come to mind, one that stands out was the brand, website, and custom registration experience we built on the team at Webflow for Webflow Conf 2023. 

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Before I joined the team at Webflow, I worked for an events company for nearly 7 years, so working on events for Webflow was an exciting endeavor. We had a lot of autonomy to push the Conf brand as a team that year, and landed on a grid based system that was flexible, efficient, and enjoyable to design the large amount of deliverables with.

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Once the brand was defined, we took things to a whole new level when it came to custom designing and developing the entire end-to-end attendee experience from discovery and registration, through a virtual event and on-site experience. Specifically, the registration and virtual event part of the project involved a rather complex, custom build that combined tools like Airtable and Memberstack with our own product (Webflow) to solve for a wide variety of requirements, while having pixel level control over every detail.

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Check out my full case study for more details and screens of the project.

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MK: How do you see no-code, visual builder platforms like Webflow evolving in the future?

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CM: I feel visual development tools like Webflow will continue to get more and more powerful, to the point where the previous assumed “ceiling” of the tools will get high enough that building websites in a more traditional way will likely become more irrelevant.

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AI will also play a bigger and bigger role in visual development tools in the future as well. Imagine combining what is already possible with using AI to code today, with the visual experience of building a website or app in those tools today — you will likely be able to make things even faster and hopefully at an even higher quality with more time opened up from AI handling most of the tedious tasks.

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MK: What are CSS frameworks, and how did the MAST framework come about?

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CM: A CSS framework is a set of pre-defined classes and properties used to build front-end experiences in a strategic, performant, and efficient way. For example, when building a website instead of having to manually define a specific width value on every single column of content independently, a CSS framework would have a set of specific classes that you can simply add to your HTML to define a certain number of columns for each device size, while all of the CSS that defines those column values has already been written for you.

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Early in my career when I started dabbling in HTML and CSS, I discovered and began to learn a CSS framework called Bootstrap that was very popular back then. Later when I discovered Webflow, I tried to re-create some of the main concepts from Bootstrap directly in Webflow so I could work in a familiar and efficient way in the tool. Mast is the evolution of those early days of my development, so its heavily inspired by Bootstrap, while focused on being as concise as possible and refined to work while within the constraints of Webflow.

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MK: Tell us more about No-Code Supply and how that started? I find myself there regularly to find Webflow website inspiration. 

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CM: Thanks so much for checking out No-Code Supply Co! The original inspiration and curated content for the site started back in 2017 when I first discovered Webflow. I began curating Webflow specific resources like sites, resources, code snippets, etc. back then to both help me save time learning and finding useful content, but I also found that curating sites made in Webflow helped when pitching the platform to my colleagues and potential clients at the time.

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I collected all that content in a few Notion databases back then, and then around 2020 I shared links to them on my portfolio site. After a while I got more and more feedback from people in the community that they found the databases useful, so at the end of 2022 I had the idea to combine them all into a single site which became No-Code Supply Co.

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Today, I still curate content for the site every week, and in the occasional slow times between freelance and family time outside of my day gig, I have been working on some additional functionality and products, but I am rather strict with not putting too much pressure on myself so as not to lose motivation to keep it going.

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MK: I’ve read you grew up playing video games, what was a favorite game of yours growing up? 

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CM: I would say the peak of my video game obsession back in the day was Halo 2! Once online connection and Xbox live was performant, it was a blast playing with my friends for hours on end.

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MK: Where’s the best place for people to find out more about you and the projects you’ve been working on? And is there anything else you’d like to plug?

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CM: Check out my website for some case studies of my favorite projects in the past, feel free to send me a DM on X, and stop by No-Code Supply Co. for some web design and dev inspiration and resources.