There’s a lot of debate on the Twittersphere at the moment after Elliot Jay Stocks’ tweet. The shocking idea that a web designer can’t write HTML and CSS seems like the completely wrong debate to be having. What should really be discussed is why we’re chaining designers to a particular medium in the first place.

Web Designers / Print Designers

There’s always this silly division in graphic design print designers and web designers are somehow different. You’re either a web designer, or a print designer. There’s room for a little variation in the mould: you can be a web designer bring print values and thinking to the web (although exactly why you’d want to do that is beyond me), or you can be a print designer with an ‘interactive’ bias.

The problem with pigeons and their holes

The problem with all this pigeonholing is that it creates a distinct lack of all-round designers, the type I’d just call ‘Designers’. This incessant and unnecessary putting things into nice little boxes makes up much of the web we see today: copycat web designers just following the latest trends that Smashing Magazine have listed in their latest ‘223 latest web trends you should be aware of’ articles.

A little bit of print goes a long way

Learning to design in a different medium with ultimate control of your layout makes designers think more about things that are too easily forgotten on the web: typography, vertical and horizontal rhythm, spacing, and how the piece looks as a whole. If ‘web designers’ even experimented with designing print work, posters, anything that’s offline, we’d see web design start catching up to the print medium. None of these fundamentals and rules used in print design are new (they’re decades old) – it’s just a lot easier to get by on the web having little knowledge of them.

But really, it isn’t about the medium

The truth is, being able to mark up HTML or write CSS is neither here nor there. The mere knowledge of HTML or CSS does not make you a better designer. Learning about design fundamentals and implementing them effectively makes you a better designer. Practicing these skills – regardless of medium – makes you a better designer. The sooner we forget about these pathetic labels and categories of designer, the more we can start to focus on becoming ‘Designers’, and start designing websites – and everything else – better.

— Craig