Ratio equips designers with the same tools and concepts that developers use to implement complex design systems. Take creative control over typography, color, time and space by using variables, scales and functions. By appreciating the abstract and rationale, designers get the chance to explore more and worry less. Discovery instead of pixel pushing.
It combines modular scales, fluid typography, color transformations, design tokens and the layout power of modern browsers.
Under the hood, design in Ratio is powered by CSS. Thus, you can do everything that CSS can do. It's certainly not the first tool doing that, but my approach is to be slightly more transparent about the underlying code and utilize it. If you want, you can always do some hand-coding in between.
But more importantly, Ratio provides interfaces that help you work with CSS without actually writing it. It helps you to visualize your design system and create abstractions when you want to.
But it doesn't force you into doing so. It's my personal take on the Web Inspector. I love web inspectors and what they can do. But what I want is a web creator.
Ratio doesn't try to just give you a single all-purpose design inspector, but instead offers multiple different perspectives on code. That way, Ratio supports both sides of web design: exploration and engineering.
With Ratio, you are in full control over individual properties, but you are also able to set up systems that can change more than one thing at a time. You can orchestrate, rather than just instruct.
useratio.com
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"AcidJazz"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
