Aaron Russell

Freelance web designer and developer

Learning HTML and CSS is not that hard

OK, so the whole should designers develop debate is as old as the hills. It’s been doing the rounds again recently after Adobe Muse dropped in on us from 1999.

In summary:

In fact, Dimtry’s post is a lengthy, detailed and excellent one. He explains why this debate is not quite as black and white as people think, and goes on to argue that learning HTML and CSS represents an ever increasing advantage to a modern day web designer.

Multi-talented bastards

As someone who is most definitely a designer who develops, or a developer who designs (I’m not sure if there is a difference), you know which side of the fence I sit on.

Without wishing to belittle any front end developers, let me say this: Learning HTML and CSS is not hard! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a skill set that takes a career to master, but it doesn’t take long to get on that path. And surely being somewhere between novice and expert is better than being clueless?

With the ever increasing prominence of HTML5 and CSS3, the huge impact that responsive web design has had, and modern design processes that involve rapid prototyping and “designing in the browser”, I can’t help feeling that if you’re a designer of websites, not only can you benefit from learning HTML and CSS, but you’d be daft not to.

7 responses

Alex Older responded on with…

I think Designers and Developers need and understanding of the other.

I don’t expect designers I work with to know every aspect of HTML/CSS but I do expect them to what boundaries me as a front end developer work within.

Same with Developers, they need to understand aspects of design and why they designer has chosen to do it in a certain way. They don’t need to know how to design.

I much prefer people to know one or the other (yes I’m the guy in the middle who’s puts the design to code/or code to design). You’ll get better results from both if they don’t have to worry about producing the other if they understand it.

Davide 'Folletto' Casali responded on with…

Yes, of course! Learning how to code is absolutely useful (even if I could well argue that in certain companies, situations and client combinations other kinds of knowledge are even more absolutely useful for a web designer, but that’s another topic).

The point of the article is that we should stop to see everything in black and white, exactly like you said, and understand that the answer to “should designers code?” isn’t “yes” or “no” but “choose”. ;)

Thanks you for having understand that, and taking the time to repost. :)

honolulu web design responded on with…

I can’t explain how tired I am of reading that phrase. I read it again today.

I’m not an idiot, and I find HTML/CSS to be hard. Not just a little, but a lot. I taught myself Photoshop starting way back with PS4, and didn’t bang my head against it the way I have with code. It makes me so angry every time I see someone post on the web that learning code is “easy” and every designer should “just do it”.

I’ve tried to learn how to code for years, and it just doesn’t come to me naturally or stick with me. I’m a very visual person, and those rows and rows of words just don’t translate to a design in my brain. I keep trying to pick up coding as a skill set, because I know that at this point people won’t hire designers who don’t code, but I’m so sick of feeling “not good enough” because I don’t think coding is easy.

Keira responded on with…

I second “honolulu web design” in finding coding a rather daunting and numbing experience. Even HTML, the “wading pool” of coding, induces a coma-like state (aw gee whiz mom… do we have to…?) It certainly has no attraction to visually oriented people (ie., most graphic designers). Coding seems clumsy and indirect to me. Perhaps that is because it interfaces poorly with the alphabet. It is forcing letters and words, and punctuation marks, to do something it was never intended for. I think many coders think they are designer’s but that is belied by the terabytes of visually mediocre web design that is out there. And it’s not meant as a put-down. The ideal solution would be a partnership, with each side having some grasp of the two disciplines to facilitate the work.

Robert Rauschenberg famously said he worked “in the space between art and life”. It’s an amibiguous message, similar to many of the koans uttered by Marshall McLuhan, most famously of course, that “the medium is the message”. McLuhan used language playfully and ambiguously. Art and good design often imply more than is actually there. Sometimes it’s what you leave out rather than put in, that makes something visually interesting. Just the opposite is true in coding. Coding feels to many designer’s like donning a strait-jacket. At least to this designer it does. I thought I had escaped the tortures of Algebra long ago:

“Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee”

Code that…okay, back to HTML for Dummies!

Aaron Russell responded on with…

@honolulu - I never called anyone an idiot.

@Keira - I think you’re getting confused between coding and coding. There’s no algebra in HTML or CSS.

Krissy responded on with…

I’ve been building websites for the last 13 years, I know the ins and outs of html/css and still bang my head up against the wall when things don’t work, and I eat, sleep and breath this stuff as a full-time job!

Each aspect of designing for the web, whether it be programming, html/css, photoshop, illustrator or flash - all have a learning curve. If you’re a more visual person then photoshop would be more of your forte, but that doesn’t mean you should completely shut out actually coding the site yourself.

If you’re looking to, over time, get into freelancing or actually working full-time/part-time for a company it’s beneficial to you to have the code background. I’m working full time for a design firm AND part-time for my own company and having the background in code, programming and design is not only beneficial to my wallet, but the client as well. Why? Because when they ask you a question about the final result when you’re in the photoshop stage, you’ll actually be able to give them a proper answer! If you’re with a project from start to finish and know how to design and code - you know that whatever you do in photoshop will be the final result on a fully functional site on the web. I personally take more pride in that than I would if I were just designing it in photoshop and handing it over to someone else to code it.

In the end, everything has a learning curve, and numerous coders/programmers and designers have concussions from the repetitive head banging but they still keep pushing and it will eventually click. Take your time, take a breath, do some research and you’ll be fine. Not everything works out of the box, and unfortunately in most cases you’re just missing a semi-colon or a parenthesis if things aren’t working right. But if you’re just copying and pasting code from someone’s source code, or a tutorial site - you’ll never know where to look.

Jeffrey Wong responded on with…

As a computer scientist who has studied the psychology of programming, CSS is coding. It may not be a procedural set of instructions or move data around but it is an abstract language with terms that interact with each according to a rule system that requires some amount of memorization and some level of inference.

A person “coding” CSS has to understand inheritance, containment, the names of parameters, valid parameter values, sets and containment, and the basic layout theory that CSS uses. CSS’s layout theory (the framework in which clear, inline, and block are comprehensible) is a very different layout system than traditional user interface frameworks.

I’m not saying it’s worse than glue and struts in Java Swing. It’s just different and it’s puzzle work to go from the vision of a layout in the head to the commands that cause the elements to hang together in the way you intended.

It is a declarative language but cognitively, it’s programming.

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