A follow up to yesterday: should developers learn to design things?

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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

Quite a few years ago

I did a talk that was loosely about the designer/developer divide

I argued that designers should be more developer

And developers should be more designer

Today, I’m going to talk about developers being designers

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

I’m a pretty positive person

But there’s certain things in the design industry that really bug me

That I try not to let annoy me

But they do anyway

One of the big things that bug me

Is...well…actually two things

1) When people say that developers aren’t creative

I’m a designer myself

But lots of designers like to put the technical people in a box

As if their creativity is somehow less worthy than their creativity

Programming is creative

And it’s problem solving

In fact, it’s one of the most direct forms of problem solving

You’re writing code, you’re creating things, you’re creative

And the second thing that bugs me

Is that developers either think they can’t design or designers stop them from doing so

Yesterday’s episode was all about the opposite of this

I spoke about designers coding, and argued whether they should code or not

To reiterate, designers should code

Designers should embrace any opportunity to learn more things and get better at their craft

And the exact same rules apply to developers

I hate the whole designer/developer design thing, full stop

I hate that we feel we need to label ourselves as one or the other

And we can’t possibly be both

Because if we’re both people think we’re worse at one of them

After all, how could we possibly be good at both those things?

On most projects, developers do way more design than you probably realise

When designers design 3 pages of a website and none of the interactions

The gap is left for the developer to fill in

You could argue that in terms of websites, when a developer is building the website they design most of the website

And developers are becoming more design savvy

Because they have to

There's too many new startups and not enough designers, so developers need to learn to design

Even if you’re not in that situation as a developer, and you’re lucky to have a good design team

When working in a team its always a good idea to get a better picture of how everybody’s job works

And as a developer, learning how to design only makes you better at your job

It’s not as a if as a developer, if you start to learn some design stuff

the programming languages will fall out of the other side of your brain

Developers learning to design

Helps to close that divide between designers and developers

When I did that talk a few years ago that I mentioned at the beginning

I spoke about designers and developers needing to get along better

We needed to stop picking holes in each other

And start working better

Designers need to start coding

And developers need to start designing

I ended the talk by getting a designer and developer to hug

But this is a podcast… so that isn’t going to work

If you’re a designer or a developer

When you get into work tomorrow,

Go hug a developer or a designer

And learn to appreciate each other’s jobs a bit more

MUSIC

This was AADA and I’m Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was:

Eutrophic by Mystery Mammal

La Besitos by Ryan Little

Jam With Me by Monplaisir

For a line by line rundown of this episode go over to …/ep137

If you want more updates about my podcast, follow me on Twitter at craigburgess

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