Member-only story
Designers who can code are more valuable
Isn’t that enough reason to put this age-old debate to bed?
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 to build that experience — is very foreign to me. It’s like an architect not understanding building materials or basic engineering. Or a chef who plans menus but never cooks, tastes, and refines the completed dishes.
Some argue that you can learn and empathise with the challenges coders face, without actually learning how to code. But what the hell would be the point? Understanding the intricacies of those challenges without learning how to code would be more difficult than just learning how to code, so you understand those challenged from first-hand experience!
The value in being a modern designer who knows code isn’t only you can replace the job of a front-end dev. You may only have to produce production code on occasion for certain types of clients, but the point is that you know the ins and outs of it. It’s about understanding what developers are talking about so you can participate in discussions that cross between design and…
