Designers who can’t code
February 23rd, 2010
Another topic hotly debated over the last week – should Web Designers be able to code their designs?
It was Elliot Jay Stocks who accidentally reignited this debate with a tweet last week. You can read his post on the issue here: http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/web-designers-who-cant-code/
Now, I’ve not worked in the industry as long many of the commenter’s and therefore I don’t have the depth of experience that many of them have, but I do have few things to say about the point.
I generally think that it’s more important that designers understand how to design for the digital platform properly, rather than being able to code HTML and CSS. For example when producing a design for the web it’s important to keep things tight, pixel perfect (I’m talking as a basis for development and not that it has to be this way in all browsers) and to make sure that proportions are equal and standard throughout the design – white space, margins, padding, font sizes and so on. This makes coding the design much easier as you don’t have to figure out these points whilst developing. I know this sounds general and what if a design is elastic or fluid etc but I mean this as a basis for the development of a site. It’s nice to get a design that’s specific in its layout so you can just code what the designer has set out for you.
I also understand this idea that you can’t properly design for the web without coding as you can’t design in the browser. Designing in the browser does help you to see if some design aspects will work well in the actual browser rather than Photoshop (or whatever graphics package). It also allows you to test and build live demos and to test interaction, but does this have to be done by a graphic designer? Elliot Jay Stocks says in his post that there’s no excuse for designers not being able to code because HTML and CSS are easy! This is a point I do not agree with. The basics of HTML and CSS are easy, they aren’t particularly complicated languages, but to actually become any good at building the front-end of websites you’ve got to invest time in understanding the languages properly, getting your head around the box-model and so on and then all the various browser quirks and bug fixes. If you want to properly design in the browser you’re going to need to have a deeper understanding of developing with HTML and CSS than just the basics and that takes time and the inclination which some designers may not have.
I’m talking in a pretty general sense here, but I’m getting at the point that I know designers who can’t code and they produce perfectly good sites. It’s just important that they understand the way that websites work and how they should be designing websites – developers can explain and demo technical stuff. Some designers might actually look ‘outside the box’ more and come up with some more exciting designs for the web if they know a little less about the capabilities of HTML and CSS (a lot of ‘great web design’ is pretty uninspiring in my opinion). It might challenge the developer more and could cause other issues such as usability problems, but this stuff can be worked out in collaboration with developers.
One major advantage of designers being able to code their designs is that they can provide a fuller service and could possibly find work more easily. Designers can learn to code HTML and CSS if they invest the time, no doubt about it! Coders like me on the other hand have a much, much harder time learning to design because it’s less about logic, standards and technical skills and more about something which isn’t easy to learn – creativity! Sure there’s design theory, but creativity applies that theory and produces great design.
That’s a bit of a disjointed post and leaves loads of stuff to be said and properly thought about but it’ll do for now.
Comment at will.
ADDITION on 09/03/2010 below:
Not long after I posted saying I’m not sure if it’s important that designers can code, and that they just have to understand the way the web works to design for it, I encountered a problem with a design I’d received for a site.
I had to basically dissect a couple of examples of how to create repeating background images in different ways and explain why they have to be done in such a way on the web. This isn’t a problem as I’m actually doing what I said needed to be done above, but it took a looooong time! I’m still not sure whether a designer has to be able to code but I can see how when designing complex sites, coders will come up against some time-consuming and difficult problems if a designer hasn’t got a decent concept of how websites work on the web.