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I used to think I was special. I had both creativity and technical skills with computers. I saw in the workplace that creatives were hired to design, geeks were hired to program, and communication conflicts between the two often led to design disasters. I felt that my left brain/right brain balance would lead me to great things. Alas, it turns out I’m no longer special.
The job of web designer has come to require people with both skill sets. Maybe not as much back-end programming, but you certainly have to be skilled enough to do more than in the old days of exporting slices from Fireworks and dragging and dropping your rollovers. A competent designer today has to be able to navigate CSS code, XHTML structures and at the very least be able to handle javascript. PHP is a must in everything I do, and most of my sites wouldn’t exist without some extensive hacking. I’m just getting started in Rails programming, but MYSQL queries are getting to be second nature. And every time I look around, I realize that there are plenty of people like me. In fact, I’m just an infant in a field that, in my younger days, I thought I could dominate ;-).
This evolution has led to the integration of design and development. There are still plenty of people who are fare more inclined to one or the other, but every day I’m meeting people who encompass both hemispheres of the brain. I’m far from disappointed. I feel a camaraderie and sense of comfort knowing that I’m not alone, that geek/designers are actually quite common.
The conflicts that used to arise when a designer wanted to do something the programmer felt was impossible or when the programmer was unable to communicate design requirements properly are becoming less of an issue. The conflict is now often between the designer and the client and communication skills are still a huge part of the job. I’d be nowhere without my winning personality ;-).
The more I’ve come to realize this, the farther separated I’ve become from Dreamweaver and it’s ilk. I’m becoming a coder, and working to make beautiful code and create beautiful things. I work in pure text, like a farmer with his hands in the soil. And I love the feeling of whipping through code because I understand it, not because I copied and pasted it from something that appeared to be working. The skills I’ve developed in the last year have made my work exponentially better. And so much easier to support. I blogged a while back about my separation from Dreamweaver (I got dugg to the front page… and ticked some people off). At that point I hadn’t even realized all of the benefits of really owning your development tools. Dreamweaver kept me separated. I haven’t given up any of the conveniences (upload on save, sftp transfers, code highlighting and completion…) but have gained a far better understanding of XHTML/CSS (for starters). All hail Textmate, Transmit, CSSEdit and Quicksilver for OSX. And the coding challenges their integration brings!
I still think being able to do detailed backend programming and have a creative design sense is hard to find. Even though my roots are in programming (mainly C/C , but going back as far as assembly, bleh!) I am much more a designer than I am a programmer.
I would rather sit down and create a CSS/XHTML design than do major hacking on an OS php application.
Sure there are more than before, but don’t discredit your abilities so fast ;-)
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