I received a submission today from a web designer who is, in his words "sick of code". He would like the web programmers and web developers out there to know a little secret "the future of web design is design" and that coders should stick to writing code that he can slide into his designs "without knowing all about tags or code". My interpretation from this rant is that Polomo does not want to have to learn HTML or CSS. He's a designer, and knowing those things just hinders his creative process.
What do you think? Does learning the back end of web design (HTML and CSS) hinder a designer's creative process? Or does it help? Do you find developers as annoying as Polomo does? And what about the developers out there? Do you agree? Should you be focused only on the code and making sure it slides into a designer's vision with no hiccups? Or do you find web designers just as annoying?
Thanks, Polomo, for taking the time to post your feelings. It should make for interesting debate.
I find it impossible to design without HTML
Cause if we’ve learned anything, developers are farmed out to India at 2$ per hour and designers like Doug Bowman run the world? That 41 shades of blue and A/B testing and results based iteration must just have been a dream.
Except it wasn’t, and it actually happened, and your creativity is not as important as getting results, and getting results is better served by A/B testing based designs and rapid iteration than petulant designers that don’t want to understand the nature of the medium in which they work.
The most talented designers I’ve worked with understand HTML/CSS, but decide design is the main focus. Knowing how pages are built is essential to being a great web designer. Designers that can handle light coding increase their value to agencies/employers.
Absolutely a big-organization, heavy hitter designer can design well without knowing code.
But that designer will be depending on people he is currently denigrating, to get his design to work on the target platform, to meet performance expectations, to keep up with changing technical bases.
If, on the other hand, each team member understands the whole process, then limitations and interactions are part of the design solution, not impediments to getting any part of it to work.
Myself, I would rather work with a designer that is interested in serving the customer. There are too many people working to suit their muse, in the commercial world.
“I find it impossible to design without HTML”
Thats right. CSS and HTML – together forever
With all due respect, this is just ridiculous. Knowing HTML and CSS doesn’t limit creativity. It actually should be required to know how things work behind the scenes. How do you expect to design a website without knowing which possibilities are at your fingertips? Or why a visited link turns purple?
Most flawed design schemes I’ve seen so far come from people who either design web pages as if they were drawn on paper, and flash fanboys, putting everything in a box in the center of the screen. They often share a strong conviction that they know best, and boy, are they wrong.
As a developer I certainly appreciate a good designer, but I don’t think designers are taking over. Let’s face it we need each others talents. Every shop seems to do things differently, my preference would be to have a designer have some knowledge of XHTML/CSS to get to a HTML template, then have the developer take over.
Most of you probably aren’t old enough to remember this, but in the early days of word processing on PC’s, you had to know printer escape codes for things like Overstrike (bold), type styles (Courier, Pica) and even to start a new paragraph. Then when HP released the first Laserjets, you needed to learn the escape sequences for the various type faces (HELV, TIMES ROMAN) and point sizes, too. Soon word processing software was developed — products like WordPerfect, OfficeWriter and MS Word — to manage all that for you, and even do the layout with text justification and graphics. There’s no reason all of the HTML and CSS can’t be relegated to behind-the-scenes with good Web Processing software just as printer codes are now with word processors.
And artist that doesn’t understand his medium?? Boy that sounds like disaster. Of course it won’t be their fault that the coders can’t implement his fantastic designs… What EGO.
Well, of course a designer needs to know some HTML and CSS and browser limitations etc. The design is a functional work of art. It serves a specific audience. The design will last for a few months before the next artist reworks it. Most everything on the web is ephemeral.
It’s an interesting comment and not the first time I’ve heard it. My feelings are that you can’t just have one thing per sa in web design you have to understand quite a few different roles, so designers I think have to know how to code to a basic standard. After all it doesn’t take that long to learn HTML & CSS to a reasonable standard and web developers need to be able to have the rudiments of design. There are many designers who work by themselves so they have to know both things, even if they specialize in one or the other.
Most of the part, I like to be a developer. However, I noticed I cannot be developer without knowing design. So I started learning from here and other sources, but most of it, from Jennifer’s site, the design, the HTML and CSS.
I find no one of them as being annoying, they both are requested to make a website as a living place, where the pages live from developing and look and feel from designing.
The control over a page is made only thru HTML and CSS.
In my opinion, if you know HTML and CSS, you expand your creativity.
I think that designs and coding kinda go hand in hand. Therefore designers still have to know coding or at least have a good foundation.
I really appreciated reading this. While I have blogged for two years feeling the way Polomo does, I have to agree that it is best to know the medium one is ‘painting’ their picture on. Which is why I am in here. I began searching for basic knowledge to be able to build from the ground up. It is confusing with so much info out here. I do like the way you present things very clearly. So, I have a question, where is the best place to begin, with XML and then onto HTML? What is the proper Order? Thank you.
a good basic knowledge of both html and css are very important to realize what can be done. i think php is a newer language that is taking over for html. writing good code is very important and there are many good code writers that can be contracted out to make the sites work better.
It’s like saying architects don’t have to learn Newton physics or math – just get the engineer to build my weird-shaped buildings!
It’s fine for designs to not need to know how to code until they start using funky fonts, shadows and glows every where, animations, etc etc
Then they expect use to take those designs and put it into a website that’s compatible with IE6+ FF2+ Opera Safari Chrome iPhones/Pods/Pads etc etc