A holistic approach – why designers should know about coding
Lukas Mathis over at IgnoreTheCode.net wrote a great article in which he pointed out some really good arguments which stand against the sentiment that webdesigners should know how to write code. His basic statement is that knowing what is possible in a certain programming language will restrain your creativity when it comes to developing the best possible solution for a design.
I have to say that I only partly agree to what he was saying in his blogpost. First of all it is not about designers writing code, since I am convinced that you can only be very good at one thing. Therefore designers should focus on what they do best - design. Also design and development follow two very different approaches - one very structured and the other very..well…”creative” (yes, I know, design follows certain rules but you know what I mean). So there should be a clear focus on one side or the other.
This by no means implies that a designer should not look over the rim of the tea cup and vice versa. Being more of a generalist myself, I strongly believe in a “holistic approach” where members of a team know at least a little about the areas of expertise of their teammates. This is similar to what Joseph Selbie wrote about in his article “Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design” on boxesandarrows.com.
Knowing the basics about adjoining fields of expertise will not only help you with internal communication but also gives you the opportunity to prevent certain problems that might not be apparent during your design process but will appear during implementation (this is especially true for acessibility issues imho) . Knowing the technical basis of a website will help you to recognise when and how to talk to your fellow coder to solve a problem before it even had the chance to become one.
That being said, I also understand the arguments Lukas pointed out. I think that this problem is not only true in the fields of design and coding. I’ve been working in the marketing department of my company for 2 years now and I have seen this problem occur more than once.
People tend to create their own set of rules and guidelines to what is possible and what not. Recently we brainstormed about package design for a new product line we want to publish soon. During this brainstorm session we found it incredibly hard to “think out of the box”, since all that conventions we had learned during our work prevented us from finding a new, fresh approach. We broke through this blockade by looking at totally different subjects that were related to our initial problem but offered new and creative approaches. We also took a look at the technical process of producing retail boxes, which gave us a completely new insight into what is possible and what not.
Conclusion
I don’t think that shutting yourself of from codeing (or anything else for that matter) will help you in the long run. To the contrary I strongly beliefe that it will reduce your potential and will lessen the quality of your designs. In my experience the best solutions came out of discussions with people who offered a different point of view on a subject, since those discussions are often the spark of creativity. You need people to help you consider problems from various angles but having a broad horizon helps you to do this yourself to a greater extent.
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