Should designers code?

Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED

Music and links from this episode

Who Is Responsible for Design - Creative Review Article

Eutrophic by Mystery Mammal

Cart before the horse by Myriadar

Where There Is No darkness by Nihilore

Line-by-line notes

There's several debates that are forever recurring in the design and tech worlds

Is design art?

Or is art design?

Should a designer do multiple things?

And the hottest topic and that comes around every week

Should designers code?

I probably going to get a bit offensive to designers in this episode.

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

Over the years I've lost count of how many times I've had this argument

But I'm going to go at it again, becaause I like causing controversy

And amazingly, I've not discussed it on this podcast before

Let me lay out my stance straight away

I have a dim view of designers who choose not to bother learning to code

It's not just about designers though

I have a dim view of anybody who actively chooses to stop learning things

When it comes to designers, they actively choose not to bother learning how to code, or any of the technical side

I'll try learning anything, because I love learning things

And we should all love learning things, because it's the only way to grow as human beings, not just at our craft

So I find it fascinating and maddening when I see anybody putting up a barrier to themselves and saying

"No, I don't want to learn that and I don't want to know anymore about that"

Knowing more about something makes you design it better, that is just a fact

Not even technical stuff, the more you know about anything the better you'll design it

So when it comes to websites, and especially now with responsive websites and there being so much changing so quickly

You have to know how to build websites, to a point

HTML and CSS isn't difficult to learn for anybody

And I can't see a logical reason why somebody wouldn't want to learn it, or can't learn it

The reasons for a designer designing websites to learn it are nothing but positive

It helps you understand websites more

It helps you design and make better websites

And it makes you a better designer

Why on earth would you not want those things?

Who could argue against those points?

We get too bogged down with titles 

And too caught up with labels

I'm a designer, therefore I can't be anything else

I'm a developer, so that means the design is left to somebody else

These titles aren't useful for anybody, because having knowledge about all those things only serves to make you better at everything

People always come back to the phrases like

Jack of all trades, master of none

But I wholeheartedly disagree with that phrase

The modern world is making jack of all trades out of us all

Especially in design

In design alone, we no longer have typesetters, typographers, and reprographics

 A designer is usually expected to be all of those things, as well as a proofreader, a photo retouched, an art worker, a account manager, an illustrator, the list goes on

So even in design, we aren't specialists anymore

So if we're not even specialists in our specialist area, why do some designers get so angry and against learning just one more thing?

And especially when that one more thing will have such a positive impact on making everything else that designer designs even better

As you can tell, I'm passionate about designers knowing as much as possible

My one viewpoint isn't the correct one, it's just my viewpoint

But I would passionately argue with anybody

That a designer who designs websites should know HTML and CSS, minimum

And if they don't, they're just lazy.

As a follow up to this episode, there's an interesting article on Creative Review's website about who is responsible for design. There's a link in my show notes for you to check it out

MUSIC

This was AADA and I’m Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was:...