Designers Will Code — Design + Startups — Medium

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A new slant on a old debate. David Cole from Quora describes how they design, And how the tools they have made make it easy.

Should designers code? It’s an important conversation for our field, but the reality is that most designers can’t and don’t code as part of their regular process. We could argue about theoretical ideals, but technology is on the cusp of rendering the whole debate irrelevant.

I think it’s true with Github, Codepen, and other sites where the community can share and collaborate it’s now easy for designers to ‘cobble’ together bits of code from here and there to get something up and running.

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  • http://twitter.com/matt_thinkux Matt Theakston

    Some cobbled thoughts..

    i’ve kind of noticed, that in a lot of these designers should/n’t code debates, that designers are generally talked of as people who work in photoshop, closer to what i would think of as visual designers. In fact i’ve noticed how much photoshop gets mentioned.

    I don’t have a super strong opinion on the debate. Ideally knowing how to code helps with interaction design, prototyping etc. it’s a good thing.

    But interaction design is one component of the job of a designer.

    Say i’m thinking about a design challenge for a digital product.

    I might have to work out things like…

    How personalisation should work.

    What approach should we have (and test) to serendipity and weak and strong networks for our digital product.

    I might have to research them.

    for example.

    Hard questions.

    So what’s my point? I think when we’re talking designer and coder in this conversation, understand that the design job is more than just the interface. A lot more.

    So if you’ve got me deep in css, what about serendipity, personalisation, networks etc etc?

    Maybe i’ll start a new debate. Should dev do design research…:)

    • http://gavinwye.com gavinwye

      As always Matt I agree and disagree with you. Say you’re trying to solve a really hard question breaking it down in to small manageable chunks that you could experience would help to keep it simple. It’s then that you can refine things as you go prototyping doesn’t always mean building the entire thing. It may be enough to see the smallest think working to know that It’s right or not. Taking you’re personalisation example just seeing how a site would be personalised would be incredibly powerful, especially if the concept was inherently complex. I think the adage show don’t tell is incredibly powerful. I wouldn’t advocate that you get deep in code I think you should be doing just enough to test your idea, when you get stuck it’s time to put your hand up.

    • http://gavinwye.com/ Gavin Wye

      As always Matt I agree and disagree with you.

      Say you’re trying to solve a really hard question breaking it down in to small manageable chunks that you could experience would help to keep it simple. It’s then that you can refine things as you go prototyping doesn’t always mean building the entire thing. It may be enough to see the smallest think working to know that It’s right or not. Taking you’re personalisation example just seeing how a site would be personalised would be incredibly powerful, especially if the concept was inherently complex.

      I think the adage show don’t tell is incredibly powerful. I wouldn’t advocate that you get deep in code I think you should be doing just enough to test your idea, when you get stuck it’s time to put your hand up.