The “designers should code” bullshit and a not so new idea

They can look at other web sites and accumulate knowledge and "best practices," but even then there is a lack of fundamental understanding.

Web designers need to understand how elements piece together in markup to know what is achievable. And even more, this knowledge inspires executions that would be unthinkable in ignorance.

It's up for debate whether designers should write code that's used in production. However, designers should know code so they are not producing designs that are impossible to execute.

As a designer who can code, I have a lot fewer conversation with developers about "can we do this?"

It's bunk!

I think the split is actually in designer/front-end developer.

If you want to make analogies to other industries, I think your concept of designer is more analogous to a "concept artist". The person who has the good ideas that are not restrained by the burden of having to think about how to build them.

However when I hear, "web designer" -- I'm thinking of someone who can create or take a concept and actually build it. Someone who uses the tools available (HTML, CSS, Javascript, et al) to create something. This person does have to know how to build their ideas from the tools available.

And I think for most projects the designer is also the concept artist. Very few (if any) web projects actually need those roles filled by two separate specialists.

So I don't think it's bullshit. Designers should know how to code. And they should be good at it too.

Learning how to code does enhance work but it doesn't mean that you'll necessarily be a better designer than someone who doesn't know how to code but has a pretty firm grasp of what the web can do based on their experience using the medium.

I've worked with top tier designers in NYC who have probably never touched a line of code. And personally, I'd rather higher a highly talented designer and teach them the ropes (if they even need it) than a good designer/developer. Because quite frankly, it is extremely difficult to find individuals who are killer at both design and development. That's why most agencies have a pretty rigid division of labor.

I agree that there are designers, and there are designers [insert vocal stress where appropriate], but we're talking specifics (WEB designers) here. They don't need to know how to program or even animate something with jQuery. But they do need to know the inner workings of floats, the box model, browser quirks, etc... You've said it yourself: "based on their experience using the medium". If you're at a point where you can really design for the web, having in mind standards, browsers, usability, accessibility, and best practices, you can most definitely write your own html and css. A web designer's medium is the "web page", and while no is asking a designer to create a Facebook, Stack Overflow, or Hacker News, we ask that they actually deliver a "web page" not just a psd that might very well not work with the current state of the web.

Your last point I fully agree with and I think I mentioned something like it in my previous post. I'd rather work with a highly talented graphic designer and show him/her how to be a "web" designer, than work with someone that might know both things but isn't as good. But on the other side of the coin, I'd rather work with a decent (read: good) web designer who can code, than with a great designer that refuses to actually study web design because he thinks he's over having to learn complementary skills.

Once again, we're asking the designers to learn to code their own markup and css, NOT to learn to program (both might be 'code', but they're completely different disciplines). We want graphic designers to keep doing design and deliver 'graphics' and we need web designers to be specialized graphic designers that deliver 'webpages'. We'll leave the real programming to the engineers and developers in the process, since that burden should not go on the designers shoulders.