137 - Should Developers Design?

What this episode covers

A follow up to yesterday: should developers learn to design things? 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 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 I’m back tomorrow Support Ask a Designer Anything Ask a Designer Anything Website Twitter (@craigburgess) Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook Leave me a review on iTunes