photo credit: Török Gábor (nyuhuhuu)
I only listen to one podcast regularly*—the 37signals semi-monthly offering, which provides insights into the thoughts and processes at the seminal web shop.
The last three episodes from the 37signals podcast have been a design roundtable discussion with Jamie Dihiansan, Jason Fried, and Ryan Singer. In actuality, this three-part series has been some of the dryest of all the episodes I’ve listened to this year.
However, there was a great nugget in today’s episode—
The idea that you could make a website and not know HTML blows my mind. It’s like building a building and not knowing what a brick is. There’s definitely different levels with how deep you go, you can be a CSS wizard or you can know basics. But you should have at least have some foundation knowledge of what your building material is.
There are several reasons that I find that this argument works quite well, but each point has a very valid counterpoint. Let’s dig in:
Efficiency.
It is shocking to see how much time is wasted in design shops and agencies due to the constant reconstruction of ideas and layouts because the initial format wasn’t feasible in the online world. Layouts done in InDesign that need to be reconfigured at 72DPI RGB. An idea that would cost $10,000,000 to implement needs to be scaled back. The list really can go on and on.
But at what point do you foresake good ideas just because it doesn’t seem quite as efficient? I’m not so sure that a little bit of extra time in production is the worst thing in the world. A really capable designer, one who understands web design wholly, but doesn’t know how to implement the CSS is still really valuable. Who cares if the original idea needed to be shaped once brought to the team meeting? Or that the producer needs to build out a file that can be sliced properly for front-end coding.
In a lot of ways, this isn’t a new issue at all. A great creative mind who could draw up a brilliant TV spot on a napkin has relied on storyboard artists for the past six decades. Or an art director can get inspired with an idea that only lived in their head, and then they’ll work with the Studio staff to make a print idea come to life in production.
Quality.
Sometimes you visit a website and it just feels right. The buttons have thoughtful rollover states. Tooltip notifications are in the right place. The site loads quickly and you can get your bearings immediately to begin navigating. This only comes from designers who have experience coding. In Fireworks or Photoshop, your mind doesn’t immediately think about clean URLs. Or what a hover state looks like versus the over state of a link. Are the gradients and background images designed from the get-go to be as lightweight and repeatable as possible? It’s the little nuances that only someone who has coded understands. When designers know code, the quality of their product improves.
But you can also tell when a design has been limited by the designer his/herself. If you know that an email layout shouldn’t have too many background images because Gmail doesn’t support the CSS for it, a coder-designer would be thinking this through too much. A designer who is blissfully ignorant to “what’s possible”, can be the one who comes up with the great layout, the art director can come up with the great idea. If a designer knows too much, they may just put up imaginary walls and box themselves in. In a creative world, that’s one of the cardinal sins.
Experimentation.
If you know whats new, what’s on the horizon—and you truly understand the “building materials”—you can begin to experiment and do cool things. How can we toy with the Twitter API and bring in data? How can we use JavaScript or Flash in a cool way to take a design to the next level? The creative person who understands the underlying technology can also begin to think about the new ideas—and not ideas that are infeasible, ideas that are new, exciting and categorically creative.
But what’s better for experimentation than someone who doesn’t really care about the techno-nerd saying, “That’s not possible!!!”? Yes, you may get more zany ideas that are mega-expensive or plainly impossible to produce, but you also get ideas that are fun, interesting and can move the needle. Ideas that can achieve the strategic objective. The idea doesn’t need to be perfect. That’s why we work in teams.
What do I think?
From my producer standpoint, I absolutely love working with designers who understand that layouts aren’t much more than an intermediary until it gets in the browser. As a developer, I like that, too. And as a designer, I feel comfortable knowing what I’m designing is do-able.
But as a producer, I like it when a wild idea comes through the pipe that I never would’ve thought of because I’d boxed myself in. The developer in me loves a new challenge, one I wouldn’t have thrown at myself in a thousand years. And as a designer, I’m humbled by the person who forgoes the latest web trend and makes something beautiful and effective.
Resoundingly, this argument underlines the value of the team in the creative process. Positive, optimistic sessions where we work together to mesh technology, creativity and strategic messaging are really what gets the job done. Hugs.
What do you think? How much or how little do you agree with the notion that a web design needs to know HTML and CSS, even at some level, in order to be able to truly deliver great creative?
*I’m not sure why I the only regular podcast I listen to is 37signals’. I do find the podcast medium extremely compelling. It’s a cheap way for super-interesting people to give micro-niches great information about virtually anything under the sun. I guess this is to say I love podcasts.
