Home Blog Should de­sign­ers code their own web­site con­cepts?

Should de­sign­ers code their own web­site con­cepts?

Neal Chester

This might an­ger some, but I had to get this off my chest about the graph­ic, print and web in­dustry.

In the be­gin­ning, HTML/CSS (and a little javas­cript) were syn­onym­ous with a web de­sign­er’s job. There was no sep­ar­a­tion of code and design. This is how I did it 10+ years ago and how I still do it today.

There was also a clear dis­tinc­tion between a web de­sign­er and a pro­gram­mer. A web de­sign­er was re­spons­ible for the visu­als, and the markup (HTML/CSS) was just trans­lat­ing the design in­to the lan­guages the browser un­der­stood.

On the oth­er hand, the pro­gram­mer made things that per­formed tasks. He wrote in lan­guages a serv­er could un­der­stand like ASP and PHP. There was a clear dis­tinc­tion between style/visu­als (de­sign­ers) and func­tion/pro­cesses (pro­gram­mers).

A new age of “web de­sign­ers”

Now I’m run­ning in­to a whole new gen­er­a­tion of web de­sign­ers — web de­sign­ers who don’t like code. They don’t know markup and they don’t care to learn it. They don’t think it’s their “area.” On top of that, they con­fuse it with pro­gram­ming.

This mind­set comes not only from them, but their man­agers and lead­ers of en­tire web com­pan­ies. Ba­sic markup has be­come a sep­ar­ate pro­cess of web de­vel­op­ment, and sadly, dis­dained by some de­sign­ers.

I found out who these “web de­sign­ers” are. Many of them are ac­tu­ally graph­ic/print de­sign­ers who are used to hav­ing a fin­ished product after press­ing save in their fa­vor­ite tools like Pho­toshop, In­des­ign, and Il­lus­trat­or. These new age web de­sign­ers call them­selves web de­sign­ers be­cause their cli­ents now ask for apps and web­sites in­stead of bro­chures and fli­ers. They can design the web­site, but they have to out­source the markup.

PSD to HTML ser­vices

On top of this change, for web de­sign­ers who know and love markup, sites are now more CMS and data­base driv­en re­quir­ing pro­gram­ming lan­guages out­side of their area of ex­pert­ise. And so this is where both print and web de­sign­er have to make some de­cisions. Will they learn new things or will they hire someone to help in these areas?

This is where cod­ing/markup/sli­cing ser­vices come in­to play. At one point in my self-em­ploy­ment as a web de­sign­er, I moved to­ward build­ing all my sites on Word­Press be­cause of it’s easy CMS for cli­ent con­trol and mul­tiple plu­gins. Only prob­lem was: it’s writ­ten in PHP, a pro­gram­ming lan­guage and a tem­plat­ing sys­tem I didn’t un­der­stand well, so I sub­con­trac­ted this work out.

The res­ults were: I wasn’t happy with the ser­vice, the com­mu­nic­a­tion or the fin­ished product. So I de­cided to learn how to de­vel­op for the Word­Press plat­form my­self. Luck­ily I knew a little PHP already be­cause I’d been us­ing the PHP include func­tion in my sites to make them easi­er to main­tain and man­age.

After learn­ing and work­ing with Word­Press for 5+ years, with 15+ sites later, I have be­come em­powered. I see why it’s the most pop­u­lar CMS — it’s not that com­plic­ated! And now I of­fer oth­er graph­ic, print and web de­sign­ers a ser­vice that con­verts their con­cepts.

So, should de­sign­ers code their own web con­cepts?

Ba­sic web prin­ciples

I think il­lus­trat­ors, graph­ic and print de­sign­ers should do something, if not learn code, at least learn the prin­ciples of good web design. The prob­lem I face when work­ing with print/graph­ic de­sign­ers is a lack of us­ab­il­ity in their web con­cepts. They make the same mis­takes that we web de­sign­ers made back in the days of the all-flash web­site. They don’t think about the user, they care more about how the site ap­peals to them, or they still think in print. I think this is­sue comes from an artist mind­set as well of: “This is my mas­ter­piece, don’t touch it.” I un­der­stand this mind­set, but it doesn’t work in web de­vel­op­ment.

If it’s not us­ab­il­ity is­sues, it’s a mar­ket­ing is­sue. Does the site align with the cli­ent’s mar­ket­ing goals, is there a clear call to ac­tion? De­sign­ers have to take in­to ac­count that many web­sites are now built to lead to a sell. Sites are no longer just in­form­a­tion­al, there­fore new age de­sign­ers need to design with mar­ket­ing in mind.

If it’s not an ab­sence of in­teg­rated mar­ket­ing design, it’s a mis­un­der­stand­ing of design ele­ments and wheth­er or not they can be coded ef­fect­ively without huge amounts of un­ne­ces­sary markup which, in some cases, slows the site down. If they un­der­stood markup, us­ab­il­ity and mar­ket­ing, they’d make bet­ter web­sites.

Pre­vent­ing mis­in­ter­pret­a­tions

As I ex­plained earli­er about markup be­ing a web de­sign­er’s job, new age de­sign­ers should learn markup be­cause it would elim­in­ate someone screw­ing up the ren­der­ing of their concept. To me, it’s com­mon sense as a de­sign­er to com­mu­nic­ate dir­ectly with the browser so there is no mis­un­der­stand­ing.

Hir­ing some of these markup ser­vices is like us­ing an in­ter­pret­er for a dip­lo­mat­ic mat­ter. The only prob­lem is: the in­ter­pret­er doesn’t un­der­stand your eng­lish well, you’re talk­ing via a cell phone with a bad con­nec­tion, and the in­ter­pret­er doesn’t care about get­ting your mes­sage across ex­pli­citly, and so the out­come is ugly.

Mis­un­der­stand­ing, mis­in­ter­pret­a­tions, and messes were my ex­per­i­ences with PSD to HTML con­ver­sion ser­vices. I’d get miss­ing line-height, let­ter-spa­cing I didn’t re­quest, un­even mar­gin/pad­ding, and oth­er visu­al er­rors. This prob­lem came likely from pro­gram­mers who didn’t un­der­stand pixel per­fec­tion and de­tail, or they were oth­er de­sign­ers who wanted to add their own re­mix to my con­cepts.

For the fu­ture

These new web de­sign­ers should learn ba­sic web prin­ciples be­cause if they don’t, their de­cisions will con­tin­ue to hurt the web. Most con­ver­sion ser­vices (oth­er than me) won’t tell a de­sign­er their web concept has us­ab­il­ity is­sues, they’ll just code it and put it on the web; and with all the stud­ies and data on good design on­line, the av­er­age web­site should be bet­ter, but be­cause some de­sign­ers don’t un­der­stand ba­sic web prin­ciples, we have this prob­lem.

Fi­nally, print is mov­ing to di­git­al. Store cata­logs, the news­pa­per and magazines are now on­line and in­form­a­tion is viewed on the desktop, tab­lets and phones. Print de­sign­ers need to be­gin mark­ing the trans­ition to learn web prin­ciples be­cause in­form­a­tion won’t be viewed on phys­ic­al pa­per for much longer.

Now, for the web de­sign­ers who already know code: should they learn PHP and oth­er pro­gram­ming lan­guages? My an­swer is: Maybe. It would help be­cause apps seem to be the latest thing, and a little ex­tra skill wouldn’t hurt the re­sume.

I think web de­sign­ers should learn enough to get by, but they don’t have to be­come a full time pro­gram­mer. I still think design and pro­gram­ming are two sep­ar­ate think­ing pro­cesses for two dif­fer­ent kinds of people. One could do both, but will the out­come be the best?

However, I’ve be­come some­what of a hy­brid though, hav­ing the abil­ity to design beau­ti­ful, us­able web­sites, but also able to ma­nip­u­late javas­cript, jQuery and PHP to my will for the Word­Press plat­form. I can’t say I’m a pro­gram­mer be­cause I’m not. I can’t even write a plu­gin, but I know what to say in PHP to get what I need ac­com­plished. I’ve had the priv­ilege of build­ing many WP themes from scratch, in fact, I wouldn’t have it any oth­er way. For the rest of my pro­gram­ming needs, I rely on the pleth­ora of apps or plu­gins already built for Word­Press.

But this is just my take on all this. I learned oth­er lan­guages and plat­forms be­cause I wanted con­trol over the fi­nal look and feel. I know many graph­ic/web de­sign­ers won’t cross over in­to new ter­rit­ory be­cause they don’t have the time to learn it, or be­cause they simply don’t want to and there’s noth­ing wrong with that, that is their choice and why ser­vices like PSD to HTML ex­ist.

Thanks for read­ing.

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4 responses

  1. Brett Singleton

    Hi Neal, you bump in­to this is­sue a lot in job in­ter­views, es­pe­cially if you can do both design and de­vel­op­ment. If you’re be­ing in­ter­viewed by a pro­gram­mer, they are look­ing at you funny be­cause you can also design. If you’re be­ing in­ter­viewed by a de­sign­er and you start talk­ing about code, after a few minutes you can see them get fid­gety and cross eyed, and you can tell that just like the pro­gram­mers, they don’t trust you be­cause you dabble in something they do not.

    I per­son­ally think this move­ment to­wards only want­ing a per­son to work in one skill set is an ex­ten­sion of the whole seg­ment­a­tion and in­dus­tri­al­iz­a­tion of art. A great ex­ample is the res­taur­ant in­dustry, at one time to be a cook meant you had to have a lot of ex­per­i­ence in a lot of areas, and high end es­tab­lish­ments still hold to that rule. However, with the fast food in­dus­tri­al­iz­a­tion pro­cess, big busi­ness real­ized that if they just trained a per­son to one task and had them do only that, it was much easi­er to un­der­pay and ex­ploit the work­er. If all you know how to do is chop pota­toes, you’re ob­vi­ously not go­ing to be paid very well, and the only oth­er job avail­able to you is chop­ping pota­toes some­where else, for about the same pay.

    I feel this whole design or de­vel­op men­tal­ity lim­its the in­di­vidu­al’s ca­pa­city to grow and ex­pand their skills. In the end sci­ence is art and art is sci­ence.

    Musashi said in Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings) “You should not have a fa­vor­ite weapon. To be­come over-fa­mil­i­ar with one weapon is as much a fault as not know­ing it suf­fi­ciently well. You should not copy oth­ers, but use weapons which you can handle prop­erly. It is bad for com­mand­ers and troops to have likes and dis­likes. These are things you must learn thor­oughly.”

    I know it is a far stretch to tie an­cient samurai texts to web design, un­less you re­mem­ber that Musashi was not just a du­el­ist, he was an artist as well. If you plan to be great at what you do, you need to dis­cip­line your­self to learn what you need to know. How can you call your self a web de­sign­er if all you do is cre­ate skins in Pho­toshop and have oth­er people con­vert it for you. The same goes for people who grab open source frame­works and then pay someone else to do the graph­ic design for them.

    Know­ing something about design helps you in de­vel­op­ment and vice versa. I per­son­ally have no in­ten­tions of lim­it­ing my­self to only grow­ing in one area. I think to be a true web artist and cre­ate great sites, you need to know both.

    I use a line with cli­ents who have cre­ated some hokey site in word­press and can’t fig­ure out why it doesn’t do any busi­ness, but who don’t want to pay the price to have a pro­fes­sion­al do it.

    “Any­body can drive a race car, but that doesn’t mean you’re a race car driver.”

    Reply
    1. Neal Chester

      You make some very good points especially about the food industry and the samurai — very well said, Brett.

      Reply
  2. lee

    Nice article, very true.

    Reply
  3. Samuel

    Amen. I have to com­pletely agree with everything you have said here. As a pro­gram­mer (with some design skills), I have met and worked with many ‘web’ de­sign­ers from the prin­ted me­dia back­ground that are just as you said. They have little or not un­der­stand­ing of the web me­di­um and some­times worse, don’t truly care to learn any­thing out­side about ba­sic markup, UI and UX of web site. So many be­lieve they are “prima don­nas”.

    Be­fore work­ing full time as a de­veloper, i worked as in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent places. Most places re­quired you to cross-train po­s­i­tions. Cross train­ing was about be­ing flex­ible with the work, un­der­stand­ing what the oth­er po­s­i­tions ex­pec­ted and ul­ti­mately un­der­stand­ing how you po­s­i­tion can best be op­tim­ized to in­crease pro­ductiv­ity in the next sta­tion in the work­flow (good man­age­ment should en­cour­age this).

    I truly be­lieve that it is fun­da­ment­al for them to un­der­stand the ef­fects of their work. It’s re­l­at­ively simple, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). When the de­sign­er un­der­stands and has ex­per­i­ence with something as simple as markup it can go a long way to pre­vent.

    This is a great art­icle.

    Reply

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