Ask HN: Should Web designers know HTML and CSS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should Web designers know HTML and CSS?

10 pointsreuven10 comments

Simply put: Am I crazy for expecting a Web designer to know how to work with HTML and CSS?

I've been a Web developer for many years (since 1993), and I've been an independent contractor/consultant since 1995, working with many different designers, developers, and other companies. I was born and raised in the US, but have been living and working in Israel for many years. My clients are in a mix of Israel, the US, and Europe.

In general, Web designers in Israel aren't expected to know HTML and CSS. They are expected to come up with one or more pages of Photoshop. The "cutting" of the Photoshop into HTML and CSS is considered to be the domain of the programmer. Increasingly, I've found that my Israeli clients are surprised (and even a bit hostile) when I say that I expect any decent Web designer to be able to work with HTML and CSS files, and even some JavaScript -- although I admit that the responsibility for JavaScript is a bit of a gray area between the developer and the designer.

Am I wrong to have such expectations? I find it totally weird and wrong-headed to think that a Web designer, who presumably makes their living working on the Web, doesn't have a clue about CSS and how it works, and assumes that this will be taken care of by a programmer. The analogy that I've used is that of a photographer: When I hire a photographer, I don't expect them to sketch what they want on paper, and then hand it to a technician who will aim, focus, and click the shutter.

I've been told that these expectations are unreasonable, but my expectations are (I believe) more than reasonable, and are the norm outside of Israel. But I'm curious to hear what other HN community members think...

Thanks in advance,

Reuven

I'm a web developer also and I work with clients mostly in Europe, Australia and the U.S. My clients are generally other developers contracting the back-end stuff to me. Generally the design is done by one source, someone else will do the HTML / CSS and then I weave everything into a working site. So, your experience has been the same as mine.

I have never done design work, but this system makes a lot of sense to me for all sides. If you hire a high end designer you may not want to pay the same high end rates for that designer to do the HTML / CSS as well. That same high end designer may not want to bother with that sort of work, especially if that person has a lot of design work queued up.

Because there are a lot of choices for people who can do HTML / CSS, I wouldn't expect the designer to do this, especially if that designer is great to work with (great to work with is highly valuable in the freelance world.)

HTML / CSS is easy enough to pick up that designers should know it, but I don't think it should be a requirement. The only time I have seen problems with this is with designers who have a heavy print background and hand over a design which would looks like it belongs in a magazine or brochure.

Another thing to consider is that the fastest front-end developers are those who do a lot of it. If I'm in a crunch for time, I would rather hire someone who is a specialist on the front end who could pump out the work much faster than someone who spends far more time in design than development.

EDIT: Actually, I think I veered away from the question.

Should web designers KNOW HTML / CSS? Yes. I think it would be difficult to get to the point of supporting yourself as a freelance web designer without learning HTML / CSS somewhere along the way.

Should web designers be expected to do HTML / CSS work? Not necessarily.

It sounds to me as though you might be expecting the web designer to be both a designer and a frontend developer. It's critical that any web designer knows enough about HTML/CSS to know the limitations of the medium and what they can design but not necessarily enough to code it.

I think ideally, both the designer and frontend developer should be capable of slicing up a PSD. I'm a frontend developer, and I prefer to do that myself so I can save things in the optimal sizes and filetypes for my workflow. If the designer does it, they will be creating slices based on their opinion of how the website should be coded.

I don't think the responsibility for JavaScript is a gray area at all, it falls on the developer. It becomes a gray area when you remove one of the pieces of the puzzle, the frontend developer.

I also don't think your photographer analogy is fair. A photographers job can be defined as a person who takes photos. A designers job is most often defined as someone who creates designs.

It sounds like you're more of a backend developer, wanting to use a designer as a designer and frontend developer. You'll probably save money and get a better result if you have the designer stick to design and higher a third-party to quickly slice and code your PSD.

I have to humbly disagree with this. People who don't know html and css graduate school out of the art department with Graphic Design. Go look up any decent college teaching web design - they put 2 years of emphasis on HTML & Css as well as the adobe design suite. Knowing Dreamweaver or expression web like the back of your hand is part of the curriculum.

I'm not at all expecting the graphic designer to be a frontend developer. I've said all along that I'm happy to take care of whatever JavaScript is necessary.

But there's a difference between knowing the technical side of HTML + CSS + JavaScript (which I certainly do) and being able to make a nice-looking interface that takes into account all sorts of browser issues and limitations.

The fact that most designers I've met in Israel wash their hands 100% from anything Web oriented, saying that they're responsible for making PSDs and that the rest is for the programmers to handle, seems very weird to me.

That said, an experienced front-end developer is always welcome on a project, and can certainly help to bridge this gap. But I really wouldn't want a front-end developer to be wasting their time making the initial HTML and CSS from PSDs. Rather, I would want them to tweak, change, and improve what the designer did, and then make a good in-browser experience that communicates with the server.

Are you crazy?

No

Should anyone doing design for the web (in all it's flavors) be familiar with HTML and CSS?

Yes

Yes

Yes

Even if they're not wizards with it, they should have a core understanding of the medium, it's limitations, and how to work within them on a basic level.

Javascript, maybe not so much - understand what it is, why it's needed, and where it should be applied, but it shouldn't be "required" so long as they have a developer on the team who can work with them to implement javascript / "ajax" functionality into their design properly.

I would expect a designer to know just enough to design for the web but shouldn't go full blown into what is absolute and relative,how to get to get a container to stretch with floating divs inside, what a variable is, or an if else statement.

People really should stick to what they are good at and stop being jack of all trades. There are way too many people claiming to be deselopers out there and I have only seen a handful that are decent.

I've seen some situations where "web designers" without any knowledge of html/css were producing designs that look more like they are for print, not for web.

If you want to make the workflow smooth and productive, the designs need to be realistic and properly layered so the web dev can do the work better and faster. I don't really see that happening in a situation when the designer has completely no clue about html/css.

my answer: yes yes yes, a million times yes. I found this article to be spot on and completely agree with everything the author says: http://andyrutledge.com/web-design-is-product-design.php

I'm a developer and while I do know CSS and html, I'm not a designer. I've cut up Photoshop templates in the past, but I usually leave it up to a designer.

Designers need to know at least some CSS or html. If not, then they are just graphic designers, not web designers.

A web designer who can't make a web page is just a designer.

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