Stuff in my head

Yes, another bloody designers who code post

Who’d have thought it? Once again the discussion has come up about whether designers should code. It’s one of those topics that seems to always be smouldering away somewhere in a dark corner like a charcoal briquette of angst which occasionally gets a new lease of life when a new article gets written and prods it back into a temporary and short-lived flame of interest.

To be brutally honest it’s all a bit dull. Especially the 94th time around, but I did want to make one little related point which I haven’t heard discussed all that often which I think is actually pretty relevant to the conversation. And that is this. What constitutes code?

Y’see, to me HTML and CSS aren’t code. They may look a bit like code and you may write them using similar tools to those you’d write proper code with, but it does feel rather far fetched to call a very simple structured markup language and an equally simple styling language ‘code’ (you need to do the finger motion for the full effect there.)

Code is something programmers write. Code does stuff. It’s scary and can lead to beards. But on it’s own, in its pure vanilla state, HTML and CSS just describe a document and then position and style bits of it so it looks like a lovely shiny webpage. It’s static. Very little risk of a beard there at all.

I’ve taught quite a few people to write HTML over the years and one of the first things I try and get across is that they shouldn’t think of it as code at all. I find the term carries with it too much baggage and concerns that it would be in some way beyond their capabilities as designers, editors, IA’s… whatever.

Instead I always refer to the production of HTML to be just marking up or writing markup. In fact one of the first tasks I get people to do is to print a page out and actually mark it up with a pen so they can understand how it is physically created using a series of boxes, containers, stylistic references etc. Once people understand that what they’re doing is pretty much the same as they’d do in a design or layout app, except text boxes, shapes and images etc just get described in your document with friendly little tags then the fear goes away.

One of the arguments against designer writing HTML is that designers think differently to developers. They’re creative, visual beasts. To start thinking in “code” will somehow stifle that creativity and they’ll produce shit work - like the two activities are somehow mutually exclusive. What complete bollocks. If you were asking someone more familiar designing a website in photoshop to actually rewrite photoshop then you might have a point, but really… anyone who has the nous to find their way round bloody photoshop’s clusterf*ck of an interface is more than capable of writing a bit of HTML and CSS.

And unlike many other new skills, the overhead is low and the gratification nearly instant. You can be competent in HTML and CSS in a couple of days. Sure you might not be capable of super elegant, perfect markup but things are so much easier now CSS support is pretty consistent across the main browsers. You don’t need to learn all the hacks and workarounds of old. There’s nothing to install or setup to get started and with a lot of nifty little frameworks like 960.gs or similar you don’t even have to sweat the pain of learning about floats and all that horrible stuff either.

So my standpoint isn’t really should designers code or not. It’s more around where is the line at which point a developer would be more suited to pick up from where a designer leaves off. I guess that depends… which is a brilliantly non-committal and useless point to make. You see HTML is kinda like the Marijuana of languages. It’s a gateway drug. One day you might be trying out a little bit of CSS and before you know it, you’re dabbling with some fancy CSS3 shit. It’s a slippery slope once you get started.

For front-end developers who might see designers writing HTML as a threat. That’s just silly. The curve between being able to build a static page and then build more complex, performant, secure and compatible client-side behaviour is steep. That is where specialisms in development become essential over and above the basics. That’s a whole world of voodoo most designers never get involved in and probably rightly so too.

So I suppose to get back to the initial point. Should web designers have to write code?

Absolutely Not. Maybe. Yes. I dunno.

What I do know though is, I really wish writing HTML wasn’t lumped in with other development “codey” tasks and it would be awesome if more designers learned HTML and CSS because beyond any other compelling argument either way, there’s bugger all excuse not to.