By beginners, I meant people who know HTML and some CSS, but not enough to design a great UI. Tailwind allows them to add a few classnames and the page looks great. On the flip side, you have a developer who can design using CSS. Tailwind comes along and, although it’s great, you’re learning new classnames and now you’re no longer using web standard properties (CSS).
This makes no sense. Tailwind is just another way of writing CSS, it's not premade styles.
> Tailwind allows them to add a few classnames and the page looks great
How is this the case any more than "raw CSS allows them to add a few styles and the page looks great"? You can't just haphazardly throw styles onto the page and it'll magically look good cause it was made in Tailwind. You design the exact same way you would if you were writing raw CSS, it's just you're putting the styles in the HTML class tags instead of modifying the CSS directly.
A person who's bad at CSS is not gonna be any better with Tailwind.
> I don't see how tailwind makes it easy to design beautiful pages, not in an easier way than CSS.
If you copy the examples in the Tailwind docs it looks like your ripped off Stripe. If you copy the examples in the MDN css docs it looks like you ripped off a decade old govt site.
By that definition it would be hard to justify anything besides HTML, JS and CSS. That would also exclude TypeScript and every JS Framework there is on earth. That's hard to justify from every angle (development and business wise) imho.
That's not quite the definition they are positing. Many of the classes in Tailwind have near or actual 1:1 mappings to CSS, but with slightly different names or semantics. A better JS analogy might be something like Coffeescript; I remember avoiding it because it felt a bit superfluous and hence not worth the tax (of adding a tool).
With Tailwind, whatever the actual merits, the biggest points of traction (IMHO) are the frankly excellent example sites[1]. You can click through numerous examples, all load quickly and without ads, that give you numerous variations of components, layouts, and even full pages. You can spin up a vanilla HTML or React app and ship good looking pages very quickly, esp. if you are bad at design.
I use Tailwind for a SaaS app because of TailwindUI and I'm pretty happy with it. I also used the Marketing page examples to put together a website[1] pretty quickly.
When the app UI gets more complicated the need for design skills definitely creeps in. But, taking a step back, using a wireframing tool like Balsamiq, and having another look through the component catalog has gotten me pretty far. I'm happy with our ability to ship quickly.
Just an FYI, the logo on the site you posted gets deformed on mobile when there’s not enough space for it and the buttons on the right to live all on the same line.
