Coding IS Part of Web Design
Posted in Design Education, Rants, Web Design
My recent post, 50 Common Web Design Mistakes elicited this comment from Wild over at Digg:
These are programming mistakes. Not DESIGN mistakes.
Maybe I sound a bit arrogant, but their [sic]is a difference between a web designer and a web programmer. Its [sic] one the industry needs to understand as it leads to a lot of confusion when it comes to hiring people.
I suppose, if my definition of web design was limited to arranging pixels, I might agree with him but there is more to web design than making pretty pictures on a monitor. According to (who else) Wikipedia, design
…normally requires a designer [to consider] aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object or process…
It’s the “functional, and many other aspects” of web design that people like Wild ignore. In this area I grudgingly give credit to the “experience design” movement for recognizing that the ultimate purpose of design is not to create a printed piece of paper, an attractive arrangement of pixels or an imposing building. The purpose of design is to create an interaction with, or experience for, the end-user using those created objects (real and virtual). Read the rest of this entry »