For Webflow Developers who don't design, how do you handle projects that need both?

For Webflow Developers who don't design, how do you handle projects that need both?

Abel Haddis, CEO of Panther Tech Industries, runs a small Webflow dev agency that partners with other agencies as their dev team, alongside Figma to Webflow and maintenance work. His problem is one a lot of developers hit eventually. He can build almost anything handed to him in Figma, but never went deep on the creative side, and more leads now want one person or team who can do both design and dev. He asked the r/webflow community how other developers without a design background handle that gap. Here is what they told him.

Abdul Awal Uzzal, Founder at TNC FlipBook and TNC Flowtnc

There are a few different workarounds. Partnering with a designer, which you are already doing, is one option. You can also start from a prebuilt template on the Webflow Marketplace and work on that base to produce a customized output. Most templates come with a complementary Figma file, so you can make some basic design changes yourself if you study a little Figma. If you have ongoing work pressure, the last option is to hire a designer onto your team.

Pavel Vainshtein, A Co-Founder at WebflowForge

It depends on the project and scale. If it is a big project for a big company, I use my own UI and UX person. For smaller companies I will use Banani and import the design into Figma. Pricing changes with scope. If there is planning, automations, and augmentation involved, the UI, UX, and development work is actually the easy part. Sometimes planning, competitor research, and flow alignment alone take a month. The UI, UX, and dev work takes less time now with MCP, since most of the work is implementing the flows, SEO and GEO alignment, and augmentation with AI and third party platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, and email marketing tools.

Today most of the price is for the planning, because we have to take our clients' lead flows, email marketing flows, and all the relevant pipelines into consideration. We are more focused on lead conversion than animated websites. In my experience, animation only really works for design studios, not for B2B or SaaS companies.

Ethan Suero, Web Designer and Webflow Expert

I might not be super helpful here since I come from the other side, a designer who had to learn to develop, and Webflow made that possible. Because of Webflow I picked up a bit of coding. I am no expert and cannot build from scratch, but I use Claude to write the code and can read it well enough to troubleshoot or make edits myself. Going from design to dev nowadays is easier than the reverse, in my opinion.

It used to be enough to just be a designer or just a developer. Now we are more like builders, or creative developers. Clients increasingly want both design and dev in one person, since it is more cost effective and they only have one point of contact. That has been a strong selling point for me and part of why I still win a lot of deals.

If design is not your focus, you can collaborate with a designer when creative input is needed and spend more of your time on implementation. Having a small, dedicated group of creatives to lean on helps a lot. I specialize in strategy, design, and dev, but bring in contractors for things like copywriting or motion design. Ultimately, implementing a Figma design or designing a landing page is a service provider thing. Where you deliver more value is not in learning design, it is in becoming a partner and advisor to your clients, someone who helps them reach their goals through strategy, messaging, and design, whatever is needed.

Isaac Farrow, Co-Founder and Webflow Developer at Whatifweb.co.nz

Find a reliable designer in your timezone, or one with enough crossover, lean on a system like Relume Library with Client First, and above all, communicate thoroughly. We started out as two contractors, one designer and one Webflow developer, and found we were so aligned in how we work and what we wanted to achieve that it made sense to come together under one agency.

Vikas Pasi, Web Developer at BlitzStudio.xyz

I was in the same position. I could build almost anything from Figma, but creating a design from scratch was a different skill. Instead of trying to become an expert designer overnight, I started partnering with designers. It lets everyone focus on what they are best at, and the final result is usually much better for the client. Over time I have picked up more design knowledge, but I would still rather collaborate than try to do everything myself.

Almost nobody is trying to become a design expert overnight. The consensus leans toward partnering with a designer, leaning on template and AI assisted starting points like Relume, Banani, or Claude Design, and treating the design and dev split as a collaboration problem to solve, not a skill gap to force close alone.