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Comment by matte_black | Hacker News Reader

I applaud you for being a designer who actually codes. I feel that a true designer in the modern web must have a strong grasp of interaction design and how to build those experiences, and the consequences of various design choices, and to me that must mean that they can speak those ideas in code.

I am sick and tired of designers who are mostly glorified pixel pushers that throw together something pretty, but give no thought to edge cases or application states that force their designs into becoming ugly or having a poor interaction, or just becoming downright unusable, all because they rely on shallow and antiquated schools of thought that were born out of the paper and magazine media industries. Pretty, but rigid designs.

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> I am sick and tired of designers who are mostly glorified pixel pushers that throw together something pretty, but give no thought to edge cases or application states that force their designs into becoming ugly or having a poor interaction, or just becoming downright unusable, all because they rely on shallow and antiquated schools of thought that were born out of the paper and magazine media industries. Pretty, but rigid designs.

I love working with designers who know they have no idea how to code, admit to having no idea how to code, but persistently work with the developers to ensure a smooth hand off of designed assets. Everyone's job is easier when they attempt to understand the other team member's job and tasks as well. I don't expect everyone to understand how to code but I don't think anybody likes working with someone who makes their job harder.

Unfortunately I rarely come across designers like this. It seems many designers prefer to be more like “concept artists for apps or interfaces” and leave gritty implementation details for the developer to figure out, rather than be actual designers who can think within development constraints, and consider all edge cases and state changes over time.

> Unfortunately I rarely come across designers like this.

Perhaps that's because "designer" is just a label that anybody can use, as opposed to e.g. an "MSc industrial design" which is someone with proper education.

I agree with your latter statement - I've worked with a few teams now, and the best output always comes from teams that have designers with good foundation knowledge (i.e., of the psychology of design, alignment, balance, colour, gestalt, typography, white space etc - they could be highly effective print designers as well), who work closely with developers with deep understanding of the medium, where both sides are reluctant to compromise, but understand where they need to.

For the former though, I actually wish more designers had better knowledge of the "shallow and antiquated schools of thought" from the print world. A lot of that was born out of decades of iteration, and many of the toys that the web gives us aren't actually very useful for the kinds of content that many of them are tasked with publishing.

While I agree with you, from my experience, it seems like something that is more often normal to have knowledge of for older designers but seems like more of a passion for young designers to fully grasp as they may have to go out of their way to acquire such skills. I've found great people to work with of all ages but if they don't have coding skills and understand the evolution of graphics into interfaces or web assets than it becomes more and more difficult to continue working together on tight projects.

I understand your sentiment but I will respectfully and strongly push back on the idea that if you don't code you're just pushing pixels.

You're ignoring the other aspects of design; research, testing, etc. Just because I don't code doesn't mean I don't understand the ramification of what I put down on 'paper'

I have coded in the past but I chose to let that skill drop as it takes practice and time.

By example, here's an overview of my methodologies. In fact, I call out how I can save coding time by iterating ahead of the dev.

http://www.pauric.net/portfolio/methodologies/

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