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Code-blended design
Perhaps it’s not, “Should designers learn to code”, but rather, “Should our design applications learn to code?”
For a long time, the design industry has shared many hot takes on whether designers should learn to code or not. To me, this is a pretty silly debate. Should a contractor do electrical and plumbing? Should an athlete play more than one sport? Should musicians play and sing? Should singers sing and dance? Yes? No? Maybe? It depends!
Okay, those might not have been the best analogies, but here is one: should designers write? Perhaps — if it helps them get a point across.
But I get it. There are a lot of designers out there who have never written any code and wonder if they should learn how. And these articles aim to help them make an educated decision.
Rather than pontificating on whether designers should learn to code or not, I believe a more interesting question is: should our design tools learn to code?
As I finish up writing this article I just realized Fabricio Teixeira wrote about this very question back in 2019.
