136 - Should Designers Code?

An episode of the AADA - Raw, direct and live chats about design and creativity podcast, hosted by Craig Burgess, titled "136 - Should Designers Code?" was published on May 16, 2017 and runs 6 minutes.

May 16, 2017 ·6m · AADA - Raw, direct and live chats about design and creativity

Summary

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:...

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