I should’ve been a little more specific in my tweet. I was talking about designers who don’t have even the most basic HTML and CSS skills to turn a flat design into an actual site. Not people who intentionally choose not to code; those who can’t. And I’m also referring only to front-end code here; of course it’s ridiculous to think that designers should also be amazing back-end programmers (although there are exceptions).
This quote is from Elliot Jay Stock on his post Web designers who can’t code, a debate he started up yesterday morning on twitter. What a great way to start the day!
As Elliot pointed out, it created quite a stir on twitter. My favorite reply is this one by Andy Budd which Elliot has also quoted:
However if you’re designing fairly large scale sites it’s often not desirable, possible or practical to do the coding especially if the complexity of the various components (e.g. complex JS functionality) outweighs your technical ability.
Now, quite a few have opened up their blogs to keep the discussion going:
- Rachel Andrew – Should web designers be able to build their own designs?
- Richard Rutter – Why designers should and shouldn’t code
- Mark Boulton – On Designers writing HTML
Reading all those and the comments are sure to keep you away from doing any work so… beware!
Tags: coding, outsourcing, web designer
