

Coders Who Can’t Design And Designers Who Can’t Code - sgdesign
http://www.attackofdesign.com/coder-who-cant-design-and-designers-who-cant-code/

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mithaler
As a self-identifying "coder who can't design", I'm willing to offer a few
explanations (though not necessarily excuses) for some of the behaviors the OP
describes, at least as far as my experience goes--if only to explain where I'm
coming from when I do things that are obviously wrong to people with more
designer experience. :) I'll take them one by one.

> Need a Photoshop mockup for every single screen, including the "I forgot my
> password" dialog and the Terms of Use page

Designers, in my experience, like to keep a design consistent--just as we
coders like to keep the code organized and generalized with as few special
cases as possible. If and when I would do something like this--which I've
never done for things as obvious as these examples--it's because I'm not sure
if the designer would want me to change it later because whatever I came up
with wouldn't look good in context. If I have some obvious model to work from,
however (like, for example, a login page for a forgot password page), I would
base it on that--after all, isn't that what stylesheets are meant to simplify
in the first place?

> Assign different values at random to every margins and paddings

In my experience, this can happen because margin and padding--and indeed, many
other concepts in CSS--are rather opaque if you're not familiar with how print
design works. I know when I work with CSS, it involves a lot of trial and
error to puzzle out exactly how to implement something, not helped by the fact
that different kinds of elements are affected by margin/padding in different,
non-trivial ways.

> Think 11px is the perfect size for body copy (and 14px is great for
> headlines)

This is a bit of an extreme example, but similar problems I encounter work
like this: I try it in 11px, realize it looks awful, and then _don't know how
to make it better_. In the case of something as obvious as text size, I'd
experimentally make it larger and see if that improves it. But in less obvious
cases, I often do find myself thinking "this is ugly but I don't know how to
improve it", and then show it to a designer, get a better mockup back and
implement that.

> Ask you to export a background image even for a 1px black line

I've never done this one, I know about border: 1px solid black. :) If I were
newer to CSS, I might Google CSS rules to figure out how to do it.

> Do not understand the concept of aligning things together

I'm willing to bet that this often happens because many things that seem like
they should be simple alignment-wise in CSS is _a bitch_ , and falling back to
tables feels dirty. (Most engineers I know, in the absence of knowledge
otherwise, would assume that a rule named "vertical-align" would do what it
says in more cases than it does.)

I admit without reservation that these are all things I should understand
better, and I'm constantly learning new patterns for improving designs as I
work. However, they don't come naturally to me, so they're things I have to
learn with the guidance of someone to whom it does.

~~~
iyerrag
+1 on all of these replies. Another good thing about mockups - they become
more important when there is a need for a reliable QA process.

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peng
How are these posts getting on the front page? The content both shallow and
banal.

Designers should write their own HTML and CSS if they care so much about
alignment and margins. It's difficult to know the limits of your medium if all
you do is make PSDs.

What's worse than coders who can't design and designers who can't code are
coders who can't code and designers who can't design. I've met an unfortunate
number of those.

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neutronicus
Or you can be one of the many programmers whose job has nothing to do with the
web, or even with UX. We still exist!

That said, I am in the process of putting together a personal web page, and
this stuff is a pain. I don't envy you guys.

~~~
petervandijck
Feel free to view-source and copy-paste mine :) <http://petervandijck.com/>

(Unless you want it to be pretty of course ;)

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kingofspain
_Need a Photoshop mockup for every single screen, including the “I forgot my
password” dialog and the Terms of Use page_

Works both ways.

I've been doing work for an agency who insist of sending me this stuff. We
need to add a new field to a form and I'm told to hold off while the design
department sends me a new template. It's horrendous but it's their procedure
and they won't deviate. I'm paid enough to grin & bear it though.

I'd like to think I'm good at both. I'm no artist but I can make a nice
looking site and I can code too. But I find I'm actually worse off for telling
people that. They assume 'jack of all trades eh?'. Maybe they're right :)

~~~
sgdesign
I had the same experience as you. My strategy is to tell people that although
I know how to code, I've made a decision to focus on design. This way I don't
get the "jack of all trades" label.

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CodeMage
Well, that sure made me feel all fuzzy and warm inside. Whenever I had to
design anything, it looked like utter crap in the worst case and like
something "obviously designed by a programmer" at best. Not because I'm lazy,
but because I just don't have talent for it. I tried. The best results I ever
got was my Flash game, Particlz. That one often got criticized for
"substandard graphics".

Now I'm thankful that I'm doing a job that doesn't require user interface
design. But in the future, if I need to work on something that need a nicely
designed user interface and there's a designer available, you bet I'll try to
leave it to him. You know why? Because I'll spend 2 hours on something and get
worse results than he'll get in 15 minutes.

Bottom line: I _suck_ at design. I don't need to you to come and tell me I'm
just being lazy.

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sgdesign
It's not really a question of talent you know. It would be like a designer
saying they can't understand an if/else statement because they have no
"talent" for coding.

Painting the Mona Lisa takes talent, but designing a log-in form does not.
Like coding, design is about following simple rules. It's just that those
rules are less obvious.

~~~
CodeMage
I had to start writing this reply from scratch several times, because I
couldn't decide which issue to address first and yet do it in the politest
possible way. I offer apologies in advance, just in case I don't manage to
achieve that goal anyway.

First of all, you're oversimplifying my comment, just like you oversimplified
the original issue in your post. I never claimed I was unable to understand
simple concepts. But the ability to understand a simple concept is quite a
long shot from the ability to apply it properly to achieve quality results.

Second, you neglected the better part of my comment where I talked about
effort, results and time. Yes, I'm pretty sure I could do design; at least, as
long as nobody (including myself) minds waiting for me to give it my best shot
and produce results that are still not as good as those you could get from a
good designer in less time. Maybe it doesn't take talent to design a log-in
form, but talent sure helps do it faster and better. In the end, "faster" and
"better" just isn't something you can toss out of the window.

Third, if you really think that you can reduce either design or coding to
following simple rules, then I'm wondering why you're bothering writing about
this at all. Just follow some simple rules to code an application that follows
some simple rules to churn out both quality design and code.

Every now and then, I see someone write or hear someone talk about how they
can do work in more than one discipline and, therefore, there's something
wrong with people who specialize. Working in game development has given me
tremendous respect for multi-disciplinary projects and the complexities
involved. From that vantage, I can tell you that I don't mind when people are
proud of their multifaceted nature; it's when they start dismissing
specialization that it becomes a problem.

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jeromec
_Or the designer who “sucked at math even in primary school”, is a “left-
brained person”, or “doesn’t want to mess up the code”…_

I believe that should have been "is a right-brained person".

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BerislavLopac
I'm a coder and I don't need to know design. ThemeForest works just nice...

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glasses
What's wrong with using 11px?

