Web designers, can you speak web?

Photo credit: Midphase

To start things off, let me state my position. This house proposes that because HTML and CSS are the language of the web, it is mandatory for anyone who wishes to design for the web to understand the relationship between HTML and CSS, and the browsers which render them.

There have been many opinion pieces written about whether designers need to learn to code or whether developers need to know design.

There have been many opinion pieces written about whether designers need to learn to code or whether developers need to know design. Using the word “many” is probably understating the sheer volume of articles that have been published. Just google “Designers learn code”. Go on, I’ll wait. Check the timestamps on some of those results, you’ll see that this debate has raged on for years and there seems to be no end in sight.

Instead of jumping right into that controversial topic, let’s talk about medium. For artists, medium is the material they use to create works of art. But medium is not only relevant for artists. Carpenters, bakers, chefs, architects too have specific media they work with.

Think of all the different categories of designers out there, industrial designers, fashion designers, graphic designers, interior designers and so on. In order to do great work in their respective fields, all these professionals must have a deep and comprehensive understanding of the media they work with.

Industrial designers need to have a key understanding of materials and manufacturing processes. Fashion designers have an innate understanding of the characteristics of different fabrics and how they behave in various contexts. Artists learn pretty early on that although its theoretically possible to use any paint on any surface, there are preferred combinations of media simply because of their nature, and this will affect their choice of painting technique as well.

It’s a pretty logical expectation to have, right? For the artisan in question to have extensive and thorough knowledge of their respective media. I think this can be said for most of the aforementioned professions.

So what is the medium that web designers work with? That’s simple, the browser! But what I find curious is, that for web design, it seems that some of us can get away with being unfamiliar with browser technologies. And to me, this is unacceptable, and quite unbecoming, to be honest.

To be fair, the browser is a relatively young medium. Compared to all the other media out there, the browser is practically just a toddler. The very first web browser (called WorldWideWeb) was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. So as of time of writing, that’s only 26 years. I’ve lived longer than that. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Browser is to web designer as canvas is to painter

A web designer’s work lives in the browser. And the browser is a piece of software that requests web resources from servers connected to the internet, and displays them in the browser window.

The World Wide Web is built on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Sure there are all kinds of media available online, but there is no web without HTML. Browsers render HTML according to the HTML and CSS specifications, which are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The web introduced us to a canvas we’ve never seen before. Browser windows and electronic screens are twenty-first century inventions. All other categories of design have had at least more than hundreds of years of history and established norms.

What do we do when we encounter something new? We try to make sense of it by connecting it to something we are familiar with. The fact that we use the term “web pages”, naturally led people to associate web design with print design.

But designers don’t want to code

Web design is more than good looks

Building a great web experience takes teamwork

Wrapping up