Learn to code or not; ignoring the code is the problem.
As much as you may or may not pretend it isn’t, code is and always will be a part of the web. Better to just get used to it.
So let’s imagine I’ve been tasked with designing a marketing poster for an event. I sit down at my Mac, pop open InDesign, and get designing the best damn poster ever. Unfortunately, I don’t really know much about the process of getting something printed, and I sure as heck can’t run an enormous four-color press myself (or really even screen print for that matter). There is a machine that makes it pretty darn easy for me to print what I’ve designed all by myself. I’m not really concerned about the quality of the print, because I don’t really have any experience with how they’re made, so I lack any frame of reference by which to judge its quality. But it’s ok, because I got it done quickly.
“We all knew that what came out of that monstrous copier wasn’t our final product.”
Now, I don’t know if this is your experience, but this little story illustrates my college design career pretty accurately. Between myself and my peers, we worked the laser printer to the bone, comping all sorts of projects. For the most part, though, we all knew that what came out of that monstrous copier wasn’t our final product. We knew in a few years we’d be working for a client, or employed by a business that had the funding to send the job to the press (or someone to manage that process for us).
Lately there’s been a lot of chatter in blogs and on Twitter about designers, and code. Coding for the web can be a fairly complex skill to attain, and currently there are a large number of designers out there who are comfortable with the world of print—after spending a few years in the field they’ve gathered the know-how about how a print job is built and printed, and can judge well enough the level of quality that comes back from the press. The last thing that many of these designers want to do is learn the overwhelming lingo of the web.
“Designers need to know the language of the web, even if that means they don’t know the languages of the web.”
Now, so far I’ve been drawing a bit of a parallel here between print and web design, and the processes involved in each… but it really isn’t that simple. Most commercial print design nowadays goes through a well-known process, where designers can be as removed or involved as they’d like. Even the most involved of us don’t often go beyond the level of attending a press check. The hard work is what we trust our pressmen to do: taking the designs we’ve made and converting them into plates, running the job, checking the ink levels and color quality, etc. Web design is a different animal.
Even today—a couple of decades since the invention of the Internet—the process of creating something for the web is a very visceral one. Designers often need to be involved with the site at every stage of the game, giving direction and tweaking details, making sure that things are consistent and useable—and pretty. It’s not an easy task, and it takes some education and experience to be able to do it well. A working knowledge of the logic and processes behind building a website is a necessity. Designers need to know the language of the web, even if that means they don’t know the languages of the web. Many like myself have found it easier to just do the dirty work themselves and dive into the code. Some like myself even find they enjoy it.
It’s when I’m developing the front-end of a website where I feel I really can shine as a designer. I can play with design avenues and concepts and immediately try them in code… to see if what I’m imagining really is possible. (Hint: it almost always is.) I can make absolutely certain that I’ve had my hands in the parts of the website that affect what the viewer experiences, and that to me is an incredible benefit to the final product. It is because of this aptitude for code and willingness to tinker that I consider myself a web designer, and why I do make a distinction of that from print designer. Yes, we’re all designers and each of us can use the processes of design thinking that we were given in school to approach nearly any problem—but some of us are simply more skilled, more accomplished, and more naturally print designers, and others web. There is nothing wrong with that.
“Telling someone you can do a job for them that you aren’t an expert at is wrong, because people pay experts.”
Sure, there’s no reason why print designers shouldn’t learn to code. As a designer, there is always room for learning something new. Do designers need to know how to code? No, not really. If you’re content doing print projects and you’re good at those, there’s no reason you should ever look at code. Except, of course, for those projects you accept (or are given) where you DO need to look at code. In such cases, yes… you do need to know how to code. Or you need to collaborate with someone who can. It’s that simple. Expecting an application to produce good code for you because you don’t know the details of how it’s done (or even how to tell when it’s quality) is irresponsible and is a disservice to your client. Web design is more than just design, and telling someone you can do a job for them that you aren’t an expert at is wrong, because people pay experts.
As a student, I may have used the laser printer, but I did so knowing that the designs I made for it weren’t going to be what I could do if I really knew how to have experts help me print it. I knew there was no bleed for that 12×18″ poster I made… that the color would flake off if I folded it. I knew it was crap, because I made it the easy way with neither the experience of how to do it well nor the help of someone who could. Go ahead and design websites if you want, but don’t expect Dreamweaver or Muse to make it good for you. Sure, we could all use Muse just for making comps to hand off to developers, but I think we know that won’t be how it’s used a majority of the time. It’s too tempting for many people to just design it in the WYSIWYG and be done with it… it treats laser prints like they’re offset prints with all the trimmings. It just isn’t the same and we know it. Designing websites is hard. It involves code, no matter how much software providers like Adobe offer to hide that from us. Code is the fundamental reality of the medium, just as paper & ink are for print.