Comments on: Coders Who Can’t Design, Designers Who Can’t Code

By: Neil

Neil — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 21:27:52 +0000

I was actually hoping this article would contain tips for those who fall into these categories, and not ways to spot and avoid them like the plague. I for one, understand good design, and can appreciate it, but can’t seem to come up with it. It would take me forever to come up with a color scheme for a website, because I can’t picture how the entire site would look, the color by itself just looks ugly to me. But give me a photoshop mockup and I could easily write the CSS for it. I’m not being lazy, in the past I have designed and coded some websites entirely by myself, but I would rather that a more skilled artisty person handle that aspect.

By: Alexey Polarny

Alexey Polarny — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 14:16:49 +0000

Nice read (btw blending modes in CSS would be super awesome

By: Odiumediae

Odiumediae — Mon, 16 May 2011 22:20:24 +0000

Tu a raison… Really, what an amusing read.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 05:10:35 +0000

I think there is a difference between coder, developer and programmers… I’m the last two.

By: Neal Carroll

Neal Carroll — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:18:08 +0000

I screamed aloud when I read this. Coders, and Designers, are such a general term!

First off I agree with you, buuuut you need to clarify here. It’s driving me insane. When you say coders, you are talking about people who deal with HTML/CSS/Javascript… when I think of Coders, I think of Ruby, PHP, Python, etc.
Those are two different beasts. Coders never have to worry about design since they live behind the wall.
Designers can mean so many different things! There are so many different types of designers out there. What you are talking about are Web Designers. And yes any Web Designer worth his salt should know HTML/CSS/Javascript. A Web Designer should worry about the whole front end and how it is interacted with.

In the end, you described 2 different Types of Web Designers (‘Coders’, ‘Designers’) that I would consider ignorant fools.

By: WPWebHost

WPWebHost — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:00:20 +0000

This is cruel but somehow I find it very true. I have encountered many blogs that posted about designs tutorials but not really applying it on their blogs.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:05:51 +0000

Very funny post. Sad that so many people took it a bit too seriously. But for me it’s also so funny because some of those things are very, very true. I know one server-side coder who can’t do any front-end code and needs mock-up screen for EVERY SINGLE STAGE OF THE PAGE, including login, forgot password, password recovery – of course at least twice, for visitors and internal users separate screens – and so on. It’s really huge pain in the arse to work as a team with people like this.

Personally I’m web designer and web developer. I found funny thing that people expect that I can design EVERYTHING. No, I can not. I’m not cars designer, furniture designer, even company identity, packaging, logos design and design for print industry is not my field. But when it comes to design a website I can do in Illustrator virtually everything. And I know how to code it. But after couple of months just designing and giving it away to another coders I realized my layouts became pretty difficult to code.

There’s no ideal solution, but I believe that every web sites coder (i’m not talking about applications programmers) should be in 10% designers as well (at least to not complain about missing mockups for “time out, you’ve been logged out”) and every designer should be in 10% a coder (at least to be able to do ANY html/css code based on his own layout).

By: Ricardo Saavedra

Ricardo Saavedra — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:19:01 +0000

I think that every designer needs to code once in a while to understand its principals. This will help a coder’s life.

By: MightyTrashCan

MightyTrashCan — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 15:18:59 +0000

An add on post cause I felt my previous wasn’t complete. The bottom line is, the web is an area where one cannot be totally ignorant of other fields. A designer couldn’t ignore the coding, assessbility aspects and the skill of the developer, while the developer need to understand the designer and improve on his ability to implement designs.

In the event you do met such stubborn designer/developer/project manager who couldn’t take a balanced view. You are left with either educating him or give in to fate (If he couldn’t see the big picture)…

By: MightyTrashcan

MightyTrashcan — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:34:49 +0000

It’s a given fact that Developers and Designers can’t live without each other (Though a designer typically have more power in small projects)

As much as we would like it, there are bound to be such cases. As a developer myself, I admit I couldn’t do any graphics on my own at all except for aligning things and knowing of simple typography principles thanks to the learning of LaTeX back in school.

From my experience, when a non technical (programming) designer work with a developer, the important thing to take note of is knowing the medium, respect for the developer and knowing what are the uncompromisable grounds from each side. The newer a designer is to building a website/software, the more he should follow the developer is my advice.

Developers may not be able to design, but they know something about software usability which designers could not ignore. Especially if you have been a print designer all along.

I remember several times when a designer insist on something being done just because it is technically possible, but the developer tries to block it on the ground of maintainbility, practicalness.etc. (Recall the designer who wanted total control on the look and feel of the site without regard to site load speed, practicalness, insist on flash with the backing of a non technical project manager.etc)

Such issues could often be solved with the designer knowing more about coding and assessbility.

A developer could also work better with a designer too by learning some common design terms and good CSS to achieve what the designer wants.

I suggest a basic course on coding and design for both designers and developers when they are in school. This would greatly reduce the problem.