Comments on: Response: Should Web Designers Know How to Code?

By: Keith Casey

Keith Casey — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:44:16 +0000

Great points… and a knowledgable designer with just a bit of code background is worth her/his weight in gold. I can honestly say that I’ve only known 2-3 but I’ve enjoyed every minute working with them.

More than anything, I’m tired of the print people who seem like they woke up this morning and decided to get into web design. They don’t understand what works, they don’t understand what don’t works… and then they hand you a PSD and expect it to be pixel perfect.

By: Lindsay Donaghe

Lindsay Donaghe — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:11:23 +0000

I’m a developer and a designer. I’ve been on a lot of consulting gigs in teams of developers and always ended up doing the UI work because none of the other devs wanted to touch it (”What? All the controls are on the page… What do you mean ‘has to look pretty’?”).

Fortunately I love doing UI work and have some graphic design skills as well so it’s been a good fit for me to just take over those tasks. And it is very helpful as a designer knowing how to build a site all the way from the web server to the browser client.

I definitely agree that I don’t think it’s a detriment to know what your limitations are when designing for the web. It saves everyone time and effort in the long run because you know what’s practical and what’s going to be a pain to implement. It’s easy to get carried away in Photoshop and make things that look gorgeous with 500 fonts to choose from and 16-bit color depth rendered into 200MB TIFs. It’s a lot harder to make things that still look gorgeous and distinctive using Arial, Verdana, Tahoma or (heaven forbid) Times New Roman that can be sliced and optimized down to a small number of 2KB files that still have a nice gradient without a ton of compression artifacts, but those are the things that you have to deal with and it’s easy to forget when you live in Photoshop and not a development IDE.

By: Martin Ringlein

Martin Ringlein — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:52:52 +0000

Well put Samantha — I love your response; especially coming from a fellow designer who learned code; as opposed to a developer trying to design.

I knew the Photoshop canvas remark would stir up some opinion from the design community — we love our Photoshop! Some hard core “artists” or “true designers” will sketch on paper before going to photoshop — I can see from that perspective how photoshop is your canvas. However, I am a true Web Designer … I can’t design anything outside of Photoshop; pencil and paper are not an option for me. For me, Photoshop is my pencil and paper — it is my sketch before really designing on my canvas (the browser). Photoshop gives me a representation of what I will be creating, but I use XHTML/CSS to make web design. Perhaps I don’t and I am just being stubborn and trying to make a point? I don’t know, but hopefully you get the gist of my point.

By: steve

steve — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:07:09 +0000

I’m not even sure they need to know how to code, they just need to know the boundaries of the medium. Some web-specific knowledge would be nice. Like the whole font issue!
The other thing is that, unlike almost every other medium, on the web the user has near-total control of the design, much to our chagrin. Not only can the user choose some ungodly font size, they can also override your stylesheet if they want. They can turn images/CSS/JS off and on. They can make their screen resolution 640×480 at 120dpi.
Beautiful web design is certainly possible, but it’s not guaranteed.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:06:31 +0000

There is a very important distinction between design and decoration that has been going around for a long time.

I personally don’t see how it is possible to design a site without enough knowledge to build the site, even if it might take a little while.

By: Suffian

Suffian — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 07:37:57 +0000

Great post! I totally agree with you. In the near future, I think it won’t be just the designers who should have an understanding of code, but also the writers and thinkers, too. I think that your whole team needs to be on the ball when it comes to knowing how to take advantage of the technology and overcome limitations of the medium. Otherwise, how would the Web progress?

By: Natalie Jost

Natalie Jost — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 12:47:49 +0000

My husband, a brick layer, loves it when we have these conversations. His two cents: an architect doesn’t need to know how to build a house, but needs to at least understand that it takes wood and right angles. :)

By: Nicholas Tolson

Nicholas Tolson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:09:00 +0000

I’m a developer with a creative background (although I never really designed sites), and I too couldn’t agree more. I think that innovation is difficult if you do not know what’s im/possible, what’s im/practical, what your toolset is… What are you building upon if you have no foundation? What’s your frame of reference when seeing other sites you like? How can you extrapolate that into your own ideas without it being simply imitation?

@Natalie - love the architect/house analogy. I’m gonna have to cop that one for my own use, for sure!