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We Don’t Need More Designers Who Can Code(medium.com)

over 8 years ago from Saneef Ansari, Consultant Designer & Developer

  • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, over 8 years ago

    CSS being only 1/20th of what a front-end dev should know means a lot of front-end devs really don't take the time to get good at it. Which leaves me in the position where the people who are actually great at CSS don't know all the JS logic.

    Sure in an ideal world all my front-end devs would know how to translate a design into HTML/CSS, but in the actual world they don't, the "designers" do.

    5 points
    • Mike Wilson, over 8 years ago

      I think what you describe is a general lack of design knowledge and attention to detail from the developer (which the article mentions too), not a lack of CSS knowledge.

      CSS is the probably the least complex of all web technologies (other than maybe JSON or markdown?). I highly highly doubt the developer in question doesn't understand CSS. What's more likely is they don't understand the idea of positive/negative space and kerning so they don't understand why exactly they need more padding here, less letter-spacing on this headline, etc. etc.

      1 point
      • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, over 8 years ago

        No, a lot of these developers are very detail oriented, just without design knowledge and without CSS skills. Their detail is about the app logic, not the way it looks.

        They get how CSS works, but they don't know how to remove the empty space between inline-block elements, or how flex-box works compared to floats, or the difference in animation performance between various methods, I could go on.

        Sure CSS is not complicated, but to build a performant, responsive, and beautiful web app you need more than just the basics.

        This becomes increasingly true when you are dealing with SASS or plugins like Bourbon which the developers won't even think to use in the first place.

        The tools and world of writing HTML/CSS is more detailed and complex than you might think, even if the actual code is relatively simple. This way of thinking is highly visual and I find designers are much better at it in general.

        3 points