Should Designers Learn to Code? Light Introduction to Web Development for Designers.
Let’s talk about something controversial today and answer the good old question:
Should designers learn to code?
My short answer is NOPE, and my long answer is YEAP, KINDA; let me explain.
Architects vs Product Designers — The Why
To answer this question, let’s talk about Architects. Traditionally Architects design buildings. To design a building, you need to understand a few different things. First of all, good design and what that even means in the medium of construction. It would help if you also considered what your client is after to solve their problem and provide the best outcome. On top of that, you need to understand working with sound design, how light works with your building, how to design around wind directions and strength, dealing with space design to achieve specific outcomes and more.
All of these requires a fair amount of research, maybe some precedents studies to take inspiration from, having endless meetings and back and forths with your client to make design decisions and keeping your design within a given budget and time.
Budget, in this case, is super important; buildings cost a fortune, and decisions are fairly permanent; mistakes are expensive! Any money you can save for your client without sacrificing the quality of the work is a good outcome. Still, you can only make these design decisions with understanding the basics of construction, how a structure is put together, how the entire build process works, including who’s involved in each process and does what, the ability to estimate time and cost as accurate as possible and more.
Now, by no means does an Architect need to sit down and do structural engineering calculations or personally pour the foundation in or layer up bricks. Still, they need to know the type of structural system they want to use, the type of bricks and construction materials, estimate the number of columns in a given space, predict how the light would bounce within the building and how wind might affect their structure, etc. Each of these decisions will affect their design choices.
You can argue that they can still do their job without much knowledge about engineering and construction, and you’re not wrong; they totally could. However, it is more difficult for them to make “good” design decisions and have compelling arguments when engaging with their engineer and builder counterparts. If they want to achieve a certain design without having the absolute basic understanding of each of these disciplines, projects might become more expensive, miss good design opportunities, and quite honestly they wouldn’t be able to deliver their best work possible.
Like Architects, we can benefit from understanding the basics of how apps and websites are built. This doesn’t mean that you have to write a single line of code, ever. Still, it does mean that knowing the very basics of coding will help you make better design choices, manage deadlines better and have a compelling argument when you hear things like, “It can’t be done” or “this is going to take 2 weeks to do, let’s do a simpler version”.
How much coding should I learn — The What
In my opinion, when you’re starting, put 100% of your time and energy into learning how to design and design only. Following that, you should start with at least the very basics of coding and learn the high levels of how a website or an app is put together. Understand what languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript are and what they get used for; those are the basics for the web. This is what most Front-End developers deal with (there’s, of course, a lot more to it, but as designers, that is all we need to know).
Then if you want to move up a notch, learn more about HTML and CSS specifically. These two languages will help you put together almost any web design layout, including some interactions. This is where I would stop for most designers. I would even go as far as building something simple that you’ve designed.
However, if you want to dive deeper, another beneficial thing to understand is Back-End Development. These are the guys that take care of the product’s architecture, security, databases and a lot more. One important concept to learn from Back-End Development is data and how it works. Often, we have to design around data that is returned to us, which can constrain our designs, and we have to either design around it or, when and if possible, ask for this data to be handled differently.
Now, if you’re really interested in learning more about how to code, then maybe look into more advanced Front-End Development topics, specifically in the JavaScript world, learn how vanilla JS works, how it is used and what it is used for, maybe even learn what React JS and Vue JS are (JavaScript Frameworks and Libraries). JavaScript is a good language to know nowadays as it gets used in both the frontend and backend world, but again this is absolute overkill. Designers usually never have to write a single line of code; they need to understand constraints around different languages and technologies.
When should I learn to code — Second what
I’ve said this before, and I’m going to repeat it, learn to design first! Design is huge, complex, and you need to learn A LOT in the first 1–2 years of your career. To name a few things that you need to learn as a designer, UX, UI, Prototyping, Interaction, Animation, different research methods, business, product management, writing copy and much more.
Knowing how to code should always be a secondary objective for you; as a matter of fact, I will stop using the term “Knowing” and replace it with “Understanding”. Once you have mastered your design skills, learning how to understand code and how things are put together will benefit you and your career.
How do I get started? — The how
The absolute basics
Watch this video that I made on YouTube, this won’t teach you how to code per see, but it will help you understand the very basics of how a simple web page is put together and what some of the above terminologies mean. This is where I recommend you start if you have never coded before.
Here are some basic HTML & CSS online courses — all three are free
If you want to get your hands dirty and actually write some code, here’s a couple of courses I recommend. I believe all of these guys are excellent at teaching.
The Net Ninja
Traversy Media
Scrimba
Here’s a book
If reading is your thing, here is a book you can purchase from Amazon:
Final thoughts
You don’t need to know how to code to be a designer, but you will benefit from understanding at least the basic foundations.
It’ll be easier for you to communicate with your fellow developers. Sell and push your ideas better, and every time you hear things like this isn’t possible, you can have a conversation and ask follow up questions to understand the problem and maybe meet your developers halfway.
The absolute basics of understanding how to code will be enough to get you started. However, the more you know, the more helpful it is for your own career. It has been for me.
I will end it with this:
Should designers learn to code? My answer is NO. But they should be able to understand the very basics of the underlying technology they are designing for.
