

Web designers that can't do markup - etherael
http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/web-designers-who-cant-code/

======
xsmasher
Disagree. This is a mutation of an older argument. The designer should be
aware of printing issues (color correction, ink coverage, trapping) but they
don't need to know how to run the press themselves.

The designer should _not_ be considering how the images will be cut up, what
CSS features will be used, etc. They should have some general knowledge of
what is and isn't possible, and what works and doesn't (interface/design wise)
on the web, but then they should throw the .PSD files over the wall and let
the coders get to work.

Thinking about the implementation while working on the design can only result
in a dumbed-down design, not something that pushes the edge of what's
possible. The best sites I've worked on came from designers who threw me a
loop, but I managed to reproduce their design anyway.

~~~
etherael
Here's the catch, I write code, I do models and controllers, and services, and
figuring out methods and interfaces etc. Handholding a designer that doesn't
know anything about layout to me sounds like a developer needing a secretary
to actually do their typing / run their IDE etc, worse yet not even a
secretary because at least it's actually their role to act as an assistant.
Say a systems administrator instead, they have knowledge of how to use
keyboards and software and things, such details are unnecessary for the
formulation of good software engineering, surely this can simply be skipped .

That's utterly crazy on the face of it, so why is it ok for designers to waste
the time of developers?

For literally hours on end it is several million permutations of "move it 2px
to the left, no, right, no, up, no down, I mean right align, I mean center, I
mean split it, I mean add that element, I mean do this, do that" and _worst of
all_ "What do you think of x" like I have any opinion on the aesthetics /
presentation of any given site. I simply couldn't care less, aesthetics and
design do not appeal to me in any way shape or form; that's why I'm a
developer and not a designer.

Isn't this one of the primary reasons we even _have_ frameworks that have a
seperation of concerns between presentation and logic? So that the artsy but
code illiterate types can mess around at the surface layer without messing up
the code? Is it _really_ so much to ask that the designer just mess around in
the view layer till their heart's content? It's in version control, it's not
like they're going to permanently break anything. Yet I find it a sisyphean
task to convince these people that they _need_ to know this stuff and not to
bother me with it.

Meanwhile, I get no code written because a designer can't figure out the
simple semantics of html/css, basic version control and mess with firebug for
themselves.

So no, I don't think it's ok.

~~~
xsmasher
I don't _DO_ "move it 2px to the left, no, right, no, up, no down" -- the
designer hands me a .psd file, I reproduce it to the pixel and hand it back.
If for some reason they need to make changes to their design I lay it over my
files or the original design, diff the diffs, and make the changes. If they're
happy with the design they created, they'll be happy with my code.

I'm not saying the designer needs to know _nothing_ \- they need to know a bit
about screen sizes and other topics related to _design_. Obviously we
disagree, but I don't want my designers thinking about the code.

~~~
etherael
Firstly, markup is not code, if it's something like javascript or actual code,
yeah I don't want them messing with it either. Markup however is quite
literally _exactly_ what they should be messing with.

Secondly, they hand you a PSD with a design, that's tedious but easy enough.
You can farm it out to someone who just does HTML/CSS and as another comment
on this thread notes, that's a very high competition low margin market. I
don't have a real problem with that, but the initial designs are never the
finished product, there are iterations all the time, and the way I've seen
them iterate is "oh we need an edit / delete / create button for this
particular widget here, it needs to be aligned over here, no we need to move
it six million times to decide, I don't know, use your intuition" like I
should have some kind of intuition about design issues.

They're designers, they handle appearance and aesthetics, I have no interest
in it whatsoever, I don't want to iterate six million psd's into their
html/css counterparts, and I sure as hell don't want to have to handhold the
designer at the stage the implementation is already finished and they decide
they want to modify pixel margins and such.

The time spent handholding the designer on my current project vs actually
doing my job and writing code is 70/30 in favour of handholding the designer.
This is flat out ridiculous and I refuse to believe it ought to be par for the
course because they couldn't be bothered to learn something as utterly basic
as css and html. I didn't even want to learn them myself because I didn't see
it as a coding issue but just ended up learning it by osmosis because it's not
complex at all.

------
rbranson
This is a very high competition, relatively lower demand market than straight
web app development. A single designer can build interfaces that will put a
whole team of developers to work. If I'm interviewing designers and I had to
choose between the better designer and one that could do reasonably good
HTML/CSS, it'd be the later all the way.

