Comic Update: Veritas Sciurus – Must Web Designers Code?
March 01, 2010Today’s comic features a gruesome shootout between Ethan Marcotte, Andy Budd, Ian Lloyd, Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman and the duo of Elliot Jay Stocks and the squirrel. Jeff Croft also makes an important appearance. Cast in the light of a rather enjoyable action film, the sequence mimics the spirit of a Twitter throwdown that Mr. Stocks ignited this February with one simple tweet: “Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.”
As you can imagine, this sort of statement created a charged atmosphere in the web designer tweet zone. People had opinions, they shared them. Those were just a few examples. In general, things got a bit tense. It’s rather reminiscent of the last time I saw this topic come up during October ’09 (I’d joined in with a post about it which you can read here).
Should web designers know how to code in order to be taken seriously?
Jeff Croft’s response to the reignited brawl is to the point (warning – profanity-laced): You can read it here.
It’s always a very fascinating argument when this topic comes up. I’d like to hear your thoughts on it: Should web designers know code? (Elliot later discussed the topic himself in more detail here. Take a gander.)
I’m not a designer, I’m a full-time web developer. Having worked with dozens of designers over the last 12 years, I can say that ‘coding designers’ make sites that are much easier to implement, but non-coding designers challenge me more. I like working with the former when I’m on a tight deadline, and the latter when I want to push the boundaries of what I know is capable.
If you’ve read Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” (which everyone in our business should) there’s a section early on where he talks about artist and writers working together to make comics. I think it’s a lot like that.
They’re two different disciplines which focus on different things. There are definite advantages to being a comics creator who writes and draws his/her own material. But does that mean you shouldn’t make comics if you don’t do both yourself? Is it somehow “wrong” for a great storyteller to have someone els create the art? Of course not.
But it does mean that if you’re on one side of the fence, you should have at least some knowledge of the other. You can be a great artist but not be very god at telling stories with pictures. And you can be a great novelist but not know how to script a comic. In the same way, you can write immaculate code, but create absolutely clunky designs. Or your design can be great, but you forget that it must accomodate live, variable and even changeable content, in a window that may be a variety of sizes.
Do designers need to code? No. But they need to know how code impacts their designs. And vice versa.
It’s one of my bugbears, but I think the use of the word ‘code’ in this context also puts a lot of designers off. HTML certainly shouldn’t be thought of as ‘coding’, as much as ‘marking up’; it’s very analogous to using punctuation. CSS, whilst much more complicated than HTML, isn’t really coding either. And some of the tricky layout-related concepts are actually pretty easily understood by most designers, in my experience.
(Embarrassed to say I just got the captcha wrong. I now feel non-sentient :(
Of course designers should understand coding. Does that mean they need to code each design themselves, no.
@Jeff Edsell – Referencing “Understanding Comics” as it applies to web development? Instant credibility, IMHO! Your point about the analogy of “artist and writers working together to make comics” to “graphic designers and coders, ahem, ‘markup-ers’ working together to make websites” I think is spot on.
If the ‘designer’ cannot code, he has no place destroying my markup/code that I worked so painstakingly on to make it easy to finish the final product because _he_ thinks it looks _better_ @%$#@$%@#. As a designer who cannot code (or understand the semantic meaning of html tags apparently… h1 != fieldset > legend) just don’t, it will cause way more headaches in the future for everyone else when you do.
/rant
I’d put an “EARLIER…” on the third panel, to avoid confusion.
Kyle, you know where I stand on this issue. I feel like much has been said over the years, repeatedly about the benefits of a web designers being able to code html/css. I remember your post a while back generated a lot interesting discussions. http://www.cssquirrel.com/2009/10/14/designers-and-code/
Instead of filling up your comment section, here are a few points of my own: http://www.8164.org/web-designers-coding/
Thanks
There’s no comic at http://www.cssquirrel.com/comic/?comic=55. It says “big error”.
None of your comics are working at the moment
[...] created a bit of a storm of controversy, and CSSquirrel, another friend of the show, has a great sort of summary of all the opinions that were put forward in response to this. We’ll link to that post in the show notes. But, [...]
[...] created a bit of a storm of controversy, and CSSquirrel, another friend of the show, has a great sort of summary of all the opinions that were put forward in response to this. We’ll link to that post in the show notes. But, [...]