Sometimes designers can code too… 5 reasons it’s not only healthy, it’s pretty good

At the moment I’ve been tasked with finding designers who can prototype using HTML and CSS.

Some people call that “a UX unicorn”, when you tell people you’re looking for interaction designers with front-end knowledge they snigger.

But not everybody is sold on this designer coder thing, in fact they’re sometimes disregarded for having those skills as well as design ability.

“Sorry, we’re looking for an English to Korean translator but you speak English, Korean, and German. We‘re not looking for German speakers.”

Daft, eh?

So, designers should code?

I’m not saying that all designers should code, and I am certainly not saying that you should be able to code in order to be a designer.

What I am saying is that having been in teams with designers who can use HTML, CSS and a bag of magic to manifest their designs I know it can be really useful, and I would recommend extending your knowledge of markup to any designer who has a bit of time or wants to learn something new.

5 reasons coding Designers (dare I call us Design Technologists?) are handy people to have around

1. They know how HTML, CSS and UI scripting works, and can design accordingly. Fewer ‘we can’t dev it that way’ conversations
2. They can produce stylesheets for the front end developers to avoid discrepancies between the proposed design and actual product
3. Prototypes! Glorious HTML prototypes! All prototypes are a thing of beauty but the HTML ones are super beautiful
4. They bridge the gap. Anything that helps us get rid of “the ux team” and make the user experience everybody’s responsibility is a good thing
5. When you find the right one for a project, everything just works.

Sold? Become a design technologist!

If you’re a content or interaction designer, or a UX or CX or whatever, and you want to learn to write HTML and CSS a good place to start is the codecademy HTML & CSS course. That said, there really is no better way to learn than by doing, so once you’ve got the basics just do it, make a thing. It’ll probably feel like a crap thing. It might even be a crap thing. A crap thing is better than nothing.