Web Design is Product Design, this post has expressed all I perceived as a qualified UX designer.
A designer who does not write markup and css is not designing for the web, but drawing pictures.
Web design is product design. Drawing a picture of the product is not designing the product. Web design is experience design. Drawing a picture of on-screen content or mechanism behaviors is not designing the experience. The functioning html/css (and sometimes JavaScript) is the design.
Graphic design is often important in web design, but only as one component of web design’s requirements. If you stop at the .psd you’ve stopped well before midpoint in the design. The graphic designer who lacks html/css skill is insufficiently prepared as a web designer. A designer who lacks competence should address that issue rather than seek refuge within embarrassing debate.
Not sure if that’s the case for Shanghai. As quite a lot of designers I have been working with or knowing are just NOT capable of writing a single line of code. That is to say once they encounter a implementation issue, just like what is quoted, they seek for excuse and try to stay as far as they can. The result is their opinions are normally neglected by developers, good designs are thrown away as well.
This situation is okay if you are working for a big name company, everything will be divided into fine-grained piece to the right people to do in most cases. On the stark contrast, it could be very dangerous if you are only sticking on “specialization” for a start-up. Wearing multiple hats is almost a must have skill for anybody in a 5 to 50 people company. And you don’t have excuse.
I can write HTML, CSS, Actionscript, Javascript and now are actively moving onto advanced Javascript such as Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile to make myself be ready for mobile application design. In the meanwhile, I also touch Objective-C and help with my partner hopefully on crunching out out small but interesting projects on iOS. And believe me, none of them is easy. I wanted to develop my developer’s logic and tried to be acute on coding for years. In the beginning, I was extremely slow and frustrated, but then, things gradually got better and better.
Now HTML5 is becoming versatile than ever and lots of big names in the tech world are actively embrace it like crazy. As a call to UX designer, is your skill set ready for this revolution?
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