Should Designers Know How To Code? Thoughts From A Developer
Last week, Elliot Jay Stocks set off a pretty heated argument, when he tweeted:
Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.
To be honest, I’m not shocked. I know lots of web designers who can’t, or won’t, code their own websites. In fact, I know so many, I built a business catering to them.
View the rest of my guest post on Echo Enduring ยป
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
Code..? Never!!! Dreamweaver is as far as Ill go with coding. Before CSS we designers had to use DW to code our designs. A pain. I know HTML as well as a bit of CSS. But why should I waste time learning and trying to do something technical when I can spend that time being creative. I want my work done right. I design because that is what I have been doing for the last 10 years and I feel I am pretty capable at it and I need a capable coder to handle my designs. I want to design with no barriers and not worry if I can code it or not. I rather let my imagination go wild and let Amber worry about the rest
. Nice post! Needed that.
If someone is going to call themselves a “web designer” then the simple answer has to be ‘yes’ otherwise they’re simply “Graphic Designers”.
But perhaps we would be asking too much of a web designer to know HTML and CSS to anywhere near the required standards we would prefer them to have (which themselves would be considered basic). I personally would be happy if the designer had at least a moderate grasp of browser capabilities (read: ‘fonts’) and, as you pointed out, image layout, by maybe pre-slicing the designs. That alone would highlight any potentially difficult areas.
As for the code itself then the ability to create a wire-frame design (of course, table-less) should suffice. Couple ability to slice images with wire-frame creation and we’d be a massive step to the ultimate goal.
As always, a great article Amber.
If a person is a “designer” and s/he cannot code, well, that makes sense. That’s why they’re a designer and not a coder/programmer/developer.