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.
like you said, design is a totally seperate entity from knowing HTML/CSS, the “debate” is a total non-starter to me.
In some respects not knowing HTML would be better for a designer imo, because you would be designing without being aware of the (many) constraints of the language
i don’t see how this debate has raged on overnight tbh, its common sense really…
[...] response to a recent tweet by Elliot Jay and discussion with Craig Burgess, I felt I needed to air my views on what skills a web designer should [...]
Hey, very interesting topic and nice post, I ended up having to write a post on it myself. Take a gander, if you like.
http://www.creativebinge.co.uk/blog/what-should-a-web-designer-know/
Rich
HI
For me it’s about great content, providing valuable and relevant information, not just a sales pitch how ‘great we think we are’, cos nobody cares frankly. They have a problem and they want it solved. If Design can help show that then great.
And its about usablity, leading the visitor through the the process gently, whether that is just to capture their email address or get them to do something, anything!
And know very few web designers who really understand this. Most subscribe to the view that ‘If it looks good it must work – but it doesn’t.
All too often a web site doesn’t even tell me what to do next, or make it easy for me to find what I need. Good design is about really understanding what the pain point of the customer is and making it easy for them to see that you are really relevant to them.
Content plus Design works. Marketing without content is ( nearly but not quite)impossible. Just ask Paris Hilton
Barry Bassnett Love the site by the way
When I worked in design studios is the 80’s “The medium is NOT the message” was our mantra. Nothing’s changed!
Unfortunately Tony, it has. Because everyone’s got PCs now and a copy of Photoshop, it’s all too easy for someone to give themselves a job title of ‘Web Designer’ and start claiming to be one.
I agree with you Tony – the medium most certainly isn’t the message – but lots of designers these days only understand one medium, and that’s web.
That’s the issue that I tried to address in this post. We should be encouraging designers to become medium-independent, instead of just designing websites, because once you can work in any medium you can really start to appreciate the value of the appropriate medium.
To address your comments Barry, yep, content is one of the most important things, probably the most important part. If you’ve got crap content, it doesn’t matter how appropriate the design is, its entire message is diluted.
The best design work is always when the content is brilliant and the design just sits back and enables people to read it.
It’s very true that a lot of modern designers don’t understand the value of content at all, and don’t understand the value of usability, answering a user’s most important points, and making sure they’re easy to find.
That’s why web designers need to start designing more than websites.
Craig, if we’re talking about the true definition of good design, nothing has changed.
Your comments about people getting a copy of photoshop and suddenly they’re a designer is an illustration of what’s wrong. I saw it when the macs came along all of a sudden everyone was a graphic designer. Unfortunately, the education system gave into this dumbing down of GD and saw it as a way to make it easier to teach creative subjects. God forbid a designer should have to be taught how to use a brush rather than a mouse.
What we are seeing now is students graduating who are nothing more than machine operators.
I remember there was uproar when I briefed students on one of my courses and said that I would reject any designs that were prepared on a mac? (nothing against macs, that’s what they used)
Good designers were and should still be medium independent. A good designer must identify/create a message and how it’s communicated will be relevant to the objective.
To some extent I can see how the situation arose. To be a graphic designer in the 70’s and 80’s you had to understand about printing and how the process worked. Some designers became very good at the print side and specialized. So maybe it’s only natural that the mechanics of web design have become a dominant factor in a designer’s skill set and to some extent the only justification for their creations.
The truth is that you’ll probably meet very few “good” designers and large numbers of mediocre ones. It’s that kind of business. The complications of measuring the quality of design mean that we are very rarely in a position to judge. Sure on an aesthetic level we can all have an opinion; we all know what we like. You refer to functionality as a measure but that’s only part of it. To say with certainty that a designer’s efforts are good or bad for whatever reason is naive.
Should we try to encourage designers to work in more than one medium?…nah. If someone can’t understand about visual communication and the needs of their target audience in one medium why should they in another? If a bad driver in a Micra gets in to a Ferrari they are still a bad driver.
Better education might help. I’ve seen it first hand poor quality “design” teachers who think using the latest trends in typography qualifies for good design. I’d be willing and passionate about getting involved in making education better, although it might be an exercise in soot juggling.
I think good design has always had a tough time and just like any other creative area it has to fight to justify its existence, but that’s the struggle all good designers face and it makes the us what we are.
For me nothing’s changed, I still have to fight for my design only difference is my passion is know backed up by my experience. Old age has some benefits?
“The best design work is always when the content is brilliant and the design just sits back and enables people to read it.”
Eer, not necessarily. If you’re talking about quantities of written content then yeah design is the stage on which it performs. Take the Guardian for example I remember the re-brand. People were up in arms at the radical layout, but the design team understood their objective and were clear on their expected outcomes. On the other hand there are times when design takes more of a supporting or sometimes a lead role(to keep the thespian theme going). The targets reaction to content can be transformed by design. Structure, hierarchy and the juxtaposition of the components can sometimes be the only means by which the message is communicated and understood. So in this case the design is really the dominant element.