I’m not surprised by the reaction to the post, designers knowledge/being able to code in HTML/CSS has been something of a holy war topic in the world of Web Design.

In the past I probably would have come down on the other side of things, but the improvements in HTML, CSS and Javascript over the past few years make so that just about any design can be coded. This makes is less important to FULLY understand what is technically possible.

This should free the designer to do what is best for the user and client needs, but often they are still shackled by their technical knowledge.

@Gareth: You are right, **BUT** as a developer you shouldn’t just be handed a design and be expected to build it. There should be a feedback process where you can give feedback and have the designer make adjustments if necessary. My point here is that that the designer should reply on the other team members (aka you as the developer) to help decide what is best, instead of doing it themselves.

@Heather: I agree with the time issue about going back and having to redo things, but the question then comes back to how do you know what is possible or not. You can self edit your designs based on what you think is possible, or you can talk to the developer if you think you’re doing something out in left field.

I’d like to add that I think your points are valid, but the extent to which you ignore certain things when designing depends on the project and your client.

I’m working on a client whom I’ve given a low project fee for a simple site. However, if I designed just to design and ignored the HTML/CSS capabilities of implementing it, then I would waste my time twice – the initial development of a design not suitable for implementation and again when I have to go back to fix it.

Overall, it is good for us designers to stay focused on our main “job”, but being cognizant of how our work enables others to do their jobs is part of what separates a good designer from a great one.

As a designer who develops her own pages a while back I found myself designing everything while constantly worrying on how I was gonna code it. I would take out ideas that I liked and thought creative cause I thought it might be too difficult to implement. As a result all my designs were pretty “squared” and similar to each other.

Then, I read an article on the design process of a website (I think it was Carsonified) were they said they designed the early mockups as (paraphrasing) “designing a poster”. It was like a light bulb went up in my head. I still think about the coding aspect because I work by myself but I definitely think its a good idea to work freely and think big during the early design process and edit yourself later.

BTW, kudos on expressing your opinion knowing it was gonna enraged a big group of the designing community, heh.

Yes the assumption is that web designers should code their own designs, which I’m not even sure I agree with, but it is the reality we are in at the moment. One day perhaps people will be able to focus on their strengths instead of having to do it all.

The article is correct in that they should worry about having a great design… and let the front end developer worry about implementing it. Now if you consider a web designer someone who does everything (photoshop mockups, coding, etc) then that person should worry about many of things mentioned in the article like site loading speeds, SEO, etc.