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Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
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Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#12Designers use a GUI tool like Dreamweaver, or do not code at all.
Developers can make a program or web site using a text editor.
Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#13In game development, we're all developers. Designers, programmers and artists are subsets of developer. Maybe producers too depending who you ask. They're certainly part of the development team.
Is that not how it is everywhere else? In my brief non-gaming employment, I don't think the word "developer" really came up.
Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#14I have a bad experience in this regard. At my last startup, I was regularly asked to hack HTML and CSS because the site constantly got ugly.
Not that I couldn't do it, but there was a designer who was hired every month or two to do bigger chunks of fixing. It meant she added 42 divs for each bug so it looked "ok".
Good designers are extremely hard to come by.
Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#15There are developer designers and 'artists'.
There are developer designers and 'nerds'.
Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#16I always say "designers make the site pretty, developers make the site do things". Granted, this still earns me a look of befuddlement, but it's the easiest explanation I can come up with.
Actually, I'd say that a proper designer actually designs how your site should work. Developers implement, hack, do backend stuff, etc. "Making a site pretty" is what too many coders think they need a designer for at the end of their projects ("skin my app!"), when perhaps they should be working with real designers from the get-go.
Even just in the context of visual design there is more to it than a continuum of aesthetic quality. A good designer needs to interpret culture and situate the product in relation to an environment in a meaningful way. Others will just follow trends and make things that may be pretty but are also empty and disposable. To say that this is a distinction between art and design I think denigrates both.
Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#17I always say "designers make the site pretty, developers make the site do things". Granted, this still earns me a look of befuddlement, but it's the easiest explanation I can come up with.
Saying that designers make the site pretty and developers make the site do things is exactly the kind of thinking that makes this whole thing a mess.
The "pretty" parts is such a small part of what design is all about.
I don't just create some skin on top of some application, I help create the underlying structure maybe even the business logic.
Also developers are not just making the things work. They are actually constructing the code space by making decisions that are based on some aesthetic principles. When you construct your code in a certain way it's not just rational it is as much emotional.
To give you an example of what design also is.
We recently managed to convince a bank to put some of the knowledge they had about their clients into play. Basically all transaction come with a unique vendor number that can be paired up to a category (utilities, groceries, insurance etc) and allow customers without having to type in a single thing to see how they spend their money.
The original design I did was nice and cool and all, the final design ended up looking rather pale in comparison, but it's one of the things I have done in my life that I am most proud off.
It took not only knowledge about how some of the innnerworkings of banking, it took political fights, fights with IT departments and so on.
But the results where phenomenal. People loved it and I neither they cared that it wasn't as sassy as I had originally intended.
Design is not just about how it looks, it's as much about how it works.
Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. In reality, many developers have plenty of design experience & skill as well. I like to separate design from pure art, subscribing to the Steve Jobs "design is how it works" mentality. To me, design is as much an engineering discipline as an aesthetic one.
While that is a good definition for the word design, the people who make software pretty usually have an art background where at best they specialize in layout (as a subset of spacing, etc), not user interaction design or industrial design degree. That degree is a thing all to it's own, and what much of the Apple aesthetic comes from. An industrial design degree is actually closer to architecture than art in many pro…
Keep in mind /UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing. I'm a UX designer but when I was in school nothing of the sort was offered. Designing for the internet was just then becoming a concept. Most of my studies were focused on print! I would say that this is true for a lot of interaction designers with more than 5 years under their belt.
Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#19Designers use a GUI tool like Dreamweaver, or do not code at all. Developers can make a program or web site using a text editor.
This it a lot less true today than it would have been several years ago. I'm a designer and most of the younger designer's I know are comfortable programming in several languages.
Anyway, your statement is an oversimplification. You could also say that the website the designer made would have better usability and be more engaging for the users (but perhaps buggy), while the developer would have a well coded site that no one (except maybe other developers) would want to use.
Re: Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
#20There are people who specialize on drawing things, and there are people who specialize on API-level programming. However, I'm a firm believer that a developer who creates programs to be used by humans has to have designer mentality as well. Trivial example: if your web app doesn't allow bookmarking and breaks browser history, that's a usability issue. But you can't fix it at the end of development process, it's something you have to be conscious about from the start.