I recently saw a discussion online asking the question, “Do Web designers need Web developers anymore?” This is a very important question but not because of what it asks but because of what it suggests. This question suggests there is a movement toward designers not needing developers. This is absolutely not true. There are many examples and reasons why that is not true but it’s still a surprisingly common question. There is one case (arguably) where designers don’t need developers (or vice versa). For small, information-only sites you can get away with just a designer (or just a developer). There are many WYSIWYG tools, templates, and canned solutions that let a designer build a simple site alone. Just as there are many graphics applications, free graphics, and templates that would let a developer build a site alone. That is of course if you only need a very simple site. The simple informative type site is the internet equivalent of a highway billboard or a flier, it’s just a placeholder for information. If that’s all you need then a designer alone can build your site. As soon as you pass beyond that level then you cannot have your designer and developer in one. Here are some major reasons you do not want a developer and designer in one.

Art vs. Science

Developers are typically science and technology minded, they are not usually artists (at least not great ones). By the same token, most artists are not great coders. Good code takes discipline, training, and strict adherence to standards. While there may be exceptions to this generalization, most people that are logic/code minded are not great artists and vice versa. Remember back in high school how the English teacher always complained about not being able to do math and the math teacher couldn’t spell his own name? Same thing. Separating design and code with specialists in each area and you will dramatically increase the quality of both while only marginally increasing your cost (<20% usually).

Search Engine and Social Media Optimization

Designers generally do not keep up on the current best practices in search engine and social media optimization, its not their job. Just like developers usually aren’t paying attention to the latest versions of Photoshop or what colors are “in” this year. A designer built site may look good but if no one can find it then it doesn’t matter how good it looks. While SEO and SMO are not very complicated they do need to be done and done right.

Modularity and Scalability

A web site is a piece of software and good software requires the separation of front-end (user interface) from back-end (processing). In the case of a website this line can get blurred or obscured completely, especially for small informative only site. When you hire a designer alone to build your site you are explicitly hiring a person that thinks in terms of front-end (user interface). A designer will build your site to display correctly but your site will be built to work dependent on the way it looks and vice versa. Why is this bad? Because then you can’t change the way it looks without changing the way it works and vice versa – the two are one. Suppose you want to give your site a face-lift? You should be able to make major alterations to look and feel without changing the way anything functional behaves. For example on this site there is a faq section that is functional (draws information from a database dynamically). That piece of back-end code delivers faq messages regardless of the look and feel of the site. The face of the site can be altered but that piece of code remains unchanged and it still works. Another example, suppose you want to expand your site and add major functionality. You should be able to scale up the functionality without concern for look and feel. Your site should be built to scale up functionally with the look and feel coming along for the ride seamlessly. Hire a designer only and you almost guarantee you will break both modularity and scalability.

Marketing vs. Production

The design of your website is a marketing function, not a production activity. Think of a magazine layout vs. the writers – two different people with different skills. One is concerned with look and feel, colors, target market, etc. The other is concerned with the technical details. Similarly think of a car designer vs. the factory workers that put the car together – different people. When you design your site you are in a marketing phase. In the design you need someone well versed in style and presentation who understands color, feel, target audience, etc. When you build your site you need a programmer. Put those two tasks in one person and you’ll cheat yourself out of the best of both.

Common Sense

Asking the “designer vs. developer” question is like asking “Do building architects need home builders anymore?” or “Do automotive designers need automotive builders anymore?” Of course they do. The evolution of any technology is always toward specialization and separation of labor not away from it. The beginning of any technology sees the inventor, designer, and builder as all the same person – as it was in the beginning of the web (i.e. the webmaster). The maturation of any technology sees specialties and specialists growing, not merging (generally speaking). This is especially true in any technology that can capitalize on concurrent production (e.g. a car engine can be built concurrent to the body). In any complex web site the back-end can be built concurrent to the front-end design and construction. This requires the separation of labor not the merging of labor.

There will be people that will say a designer and developer can be one. Everyone “knows” that one guy that claims he can do both. If that all-in-one wonder person exists then he’s the exception to the rule. Not all sites need to be spectacular, some are just placeholders for basic information, however if you want a really good site then you need separate designers and developers.

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I wasn’t into the book very much at first. The layout of the pages is kinda weird and artsy, making it a bit hard to read, but thanks to the briefness of text on each pages, it’ isn’t so bad. I warmed up to it halfway through the book, as it began covering some ideas I could use with my own clients. This book is perfect for people who go out and pitch clients in person, although a lot of what it covers can be translated online or on the phone as well.

The book spans 240 pages with eight chapters and each page is a different “section” or topic (similar to the 37signals Rework book). Some of the more interesting chapters include: Learn By Asking The Right Questions, How To Present A Powerful Pitch and How To Handle Objections.

IdeaSelling has some unique viewpoints in the way you view and treat your clients. I was especially interested in the section about selling, where they give you a scale to put your client on from unaware of you and your product to ready to buy. It’s quite an interesting way to view the sales process.

Where to buy it

You can find IdeaSelling at Amazon for $11.55

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This got me thinking. I would love to write this book considering that I was trained to be a graphic designer in college, have been coding since middle school and worked as a web designer for a few years. Who better to write this book that someone who’s been on every side?

Unfortunately I’m pretty busy so I don’t think I’ll be writing one any time soon. So I thought I’d spend some time today thinking about some advice I’d give a graphic designer who wanted to move into the web. Here goes.

The Grid is More Important on the Web

Graphic designers love using the grid, so a web-based grid shouldn’t come as a surprise to them. However, grids for web design are much more different than a regular design grid.

Unlike print design, you never have set dimensions. For example, a print designer might be doing something on an 8.5×11 sized paper. On the web however, some people might have 3″ screens, or they might have 30″ monitors and you have to cater to both. Also, there’s technically no limit to how long a web page can be, unlike a real page of paper.

You also run into coding and browser issues when designing off a grid. When designing a website, remember that coded elements can only be rectangle shaped. A developer can’t code a rounded element.

There’s More Than One “Printer” On the Web

When designing for print, you need to know the printer you’re going to use’s type of paper, ink and requirements for files. That’s it. One the web however, you have to remember different screen sizes, different browsers, even the same browser on different operating systems. Plus now we have mobile devices like the iPhone and the *gay* Droid and larger mobile devices like the iPad. Your site should ideally be able to work on all of them with or without mobile versions.

Don’t Squeeze

Unlike print, you don’t have to squeeze every bit of info on one page or in one area. You can set multiple pages in a site, dropdown menus, sliders and tabs to hold extra content.

This means that the website also isn’t static. Unlike paper you can have things moving around, you can change the appearance on the site based on page load or type of browser agent.

Too Little Decoration Please

In print, everything costs extra. Even colors. A two color print costs much less than a 3 or 4 color print. Embossing, gloss, even the type of paper you choose in your design can add up quickly in cost. This isn’t necessarily true in web design though. You can add all sorts of cool effects and decoration to the site design-wise and it won’t cost any more.

Because of this, I’ve seen a ton of print designers who pile on every rounded corner, gradient, swoosh or anything else they can. Please stop!

You Thoughts

What’s some of the advice you’d give to a graphic designer who wanted to move into the web?

image by Ross Catrow

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If you follow me on Goodreads, you know that I absolutely love to read. I’ve always been a big reader, but since I’ve become a freelance I’ve made sure to read even more than usual, in the field of business, development and the web in general.

Reading is essential to any developer’s improvement. While blogs and magazines are great to read for a quick update, nothing replaces a good informative book. Even though web development isn’t the most interesting topic to read about, I’ve been able to find a lot of interesting and informative books over the years that have helped me to improve both my dev and business skills.

Read the rest of my post on FreelanceFolder »

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I was able to get him to stop working for a few minutes in order to answer some questions and let us in to some of his juicy secrets. Let’s dive out and find out who this guy really is!

First, can we have a short bio of who you are? Did you go to school for design?

My name is Francisco Inchauste. I am also known as Finch from my website. I’m a designer and writer.

I didn’t go to school for design. In my first job I volunteered to try and help out while one of the designers was gone for a few months. They ended up liking the work I was doing. You could say I am self-taught, but that isn’t the reality of it. I was really fortunate to have some great mentors along the way that taught me a lot and guided me towards the fundamentals of graphic design. Without them I don’t think I would have the mindset I needed to be a designer. I did end up taking some courses in typography and print production. Jumping in the deep end and getting experience, as well as finding mentors, was everything.

What do you do for a living? Do you have a full-time job, do you freelance?

I work for Universal Mind as a Senior UX Designer in our Michigan UX studio. We create applications for companies like Verizon and Adobe (and many others). The projects are always about solving very interesting problems through design. Many times there are not things out there you can refer to as a benchmark. Everyone from design to development is really great at what they do. It pushes me to grow everyday. At the same time they don’t take themselves too seriously (a.k.a. no big egos) and are easy to work with.

What I love about my job is I can come into the office and collaborate with the team, or work at home for the week to just crank on some work. It’s a very flexible environment.

What do you specialize in?

My sweet spot is interaction design. I have been moving away from designing websites in the past few years. I focus on design for desktop software, web apps, and I’m also doing more work for devices like the iPad.

I work with the team to create the front end of the application. We call it the design framework. I also work on the more IA piece of projects to sketch out the structure and screens, as well as wireframe. I love this part because you are laying the foundation of the design and quickly figuring out what works and what doesn’t in quick iterations with the team.

Print or web? Why?

Print. If you look at the trends, every web/digital designer wants to be a print designer. Although, not literally. We’re just pushing the designs behind our flat, smooth screens to have some sort of life and become much more tactile. Look at the use of faux surfaces, added texture to elements, and the infamous letterpress effect.

Now with tablet devices we’re seeing the surge of published materials like the Wired magazine app being designed to mimic print magazine layouts. The art directed posts and articles for blogs also do the same thing for websites. It’s natural that as digital designers we would take inspiration from this more established form of design.

Where do you find your inspiration?

Everywhere. The creative side of my mind is always on. I stash away ideas for later use. I try to have a notebook handy to capture ideas if I can. For some reason when I do work that doesn’t require much thought, like mowing the lawn, my mind starts generating tons of ideas for designs or articles I’m working on.

As for pure design inspiration, I find a lot of it in looking at handcrafted work and vintage illustrations. One of my favorite blogs right now is A Journey Round My Skull. Some really cool stuff there.

Who’s your favorite designer? Typographer?

I know it’s almost a cliché at this point, but Paul Rand. It’s not necessarily from his design sensibility alone. It’s from his design thinking. Every time I’ve seen a video of him talking about design, or read anything he has written, it is very poetic. I can only aspire to have that same clarity and be able to articulate my thoughts about something so encompassing as design.

My favorite typographer is quite easy. My big ass logo would not be what it is without the work of Alejandro Paul. His type foundry Sudtipos has some nice work. Another foundry I really like is Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

How do you start a new project? Do you sketch?

If I am starting a project with the team, we whiteboard, and use a lot of sticky notes. If it is just something I am working on without anyone else I try to start with sketches. I still have a bad habit of wanting to just start designing in Fireworks, but I find it is much more efficient if don’t. I can find and discount solutions that seem great in my head because once you start to build out the screens or workflow you quickly find what works. Better to do that in 20 minutes on a sketchpad, rather than an hour or more on the computer.

What’s your favorite type of project to do?

I love projects that are starting from scratch and where I’m not just brought in to fix something that is near the end. Design isn’t meant to cover up problems; it’s meant to solve them. That also has to do with how people think about design. If they only see it as a veneer, then they will never get a value out of it. If they see design as a balance of things that are visible and invisible, then the project can really be successful.

I see many cases that people bring the designer in after the software or website is functional. When you leave design out of a product it does not equal an absence of design, it means an intentional creation of poor design. Surface level touch ups can’t cover up a poor experience under the hood.

Can you do any development? Is your HTML pretty?

Well… I wouldn’t say I am a developer by any means. I try to structure my HTML and CSS as good as I am able to. It is very important for me to have valid code. Although I forgot to do that the last time I updated and was blaming other things. I really only code and maintain my personal site and CMS. It’s a better world for that.

What’s something you think you do well? What’s something you need improvement in?

Design for both. There is this point where you know that you suck at certain parts of design and are good at others. I think you can only get there through experience. I don’t think that there will ever be a point where I get to the top of the design mountain and say I’ve conquered it. It is this constant in your career where you get to the top of one mountain only to find there is an entire range of mountains you couldn’t see before. At that point you have to choose which one to conquer next. You also realize you’ll never be able to physically climb all of them.

Where did you come up with the Finch identity? Why such a big logo? Are you compensating?

I came up with the identity while I was researching typefaces for a while and came across a few that worked. Once I put the Finch name on the page using Candy Script, I knew it was right.

When I was working on the last version of the site in late 2008 I was trying to be more graphic and design the site with a bold, print feel. I wanted something like you would find on the intro page for a feature article in a magazine. For the heck of it I made the logo huge and dropped it on the page. I knew it would either be misunderstood or that people would like it. Either way it caused a reaction, which I think is a good thing.

Mac or PC?

Mac for sure.

Is Scrivs whiny? (Don’t worry, he’s too mean to read my blog, he’ll never know what you really think of him)

I think Scrivs (Drawar) is a good guy and is working hard at building a great community. I don’t think he is whiny, maybe more wimpy. He needs to really stand up to some of these other design community blogs and tell them to get out of the way.

Tell us something no one online knows about

I’ll give you two as promised:

1) The name Finch is not just some random thing. A long time ago someone said they would type my name in an email and “F, Inch” would come up and not show the rest of my last name. So she started calling me Finch. I decided it would be a good identity for my design work.

2) I used to be a postman. Maybe more postboy at the time. Anyway, I worked for the U.S. Postal Service as a mail carrier for a bit during college.

For the ladies in the design/dev world, are you single?

I think the interest in this question will have passed after seeing my picture. If you must know, I am taken. However, if you are reading this and your name is Shakira, then I am very single.

The Readers

Any questions for Finch?

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So it was with pleasure that when he announced his eBook, I was able to get(beg for) an advanced copy in order to review for you guys – and it’s great!

Even though 41 Questions To Ask Before You Start A Web Project was really meant for companies who were starting their own web project, I think it’s something every web agency and freelancer should read and give to every one of their clients.

What’s It About?

Basically, the book is split into six sections with the last section being a group “cheat sheets” that allow you to easily use the questions in the book. The five sections consist of the 41 Questions split up, with a quick explanation to the section and who should be asked the questions. Each question also contains a further explanation of what it’s meant for. The five sections are:

• Strategy
• Marketing and Positioning
• Design
• Production
• Management

The book itself is only 27 pages long, including the cheat sheets, so it’s a very quick and informative reading that one can finish in less than 30 minutes.

Why Would I Need This Book?

I mentioned earlier that this book was meant for the client itself, not for the web agency or freelancer, so why would you need it? I think the 41 Questions themselves are a great way to find out everything you’d need to know from the client before you begin work on the project. We all know how tough it can be to find out what clients what – and what they need – when starting a project from scratch. Thankfully, Justin Davis has written a new eBook to help us gauge exactly what a project entails, what it takes to make it happen and how to do it!

Where Can I Find It?

You can download the eBook from Madera Labs here for only $9.95!

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