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Designers who can code are more valuable
Isn’t that enough reason to put this age-old debate to bed?
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Oh no. Here we go again. Another “should designers know how to code?” opinion. Hear me out, this one’s simple.
I’ve always believed — and have yet to hear a convincing argument against it — that UX/UI/interaction designers who can code are better designers. You need to understand the possibilities and constraints of your medium in order to do the best design work that technology can allow for. There’s no better way to gain this understanding than knowing how to build your own designs.
(When I say coding, I refer to front-end code — HTML, CSS, and some Javascript. I wouldn’t expect most designers to dabble much in backend.)
This may stem from the fact that I got into web design back in the days when CSS was barely a thing, most websites were static HTML pages, and layouts were coded in tables. Back then, if you wanted to publish anything on the web, you had to know how to built it yourself. There were no sophisticated online website builders, or specialist front-end devs on your team. It was just you, Photoshop, a text editor, and your free Geocities account. Boy, that was an exciting frontier.
So the concept of designing anything digital and interactive — without knowing how…