The Design/Development Divide: Part I

A Brief History of Websites

The web as we know it is a descendant of networks dreamed up by military consultants and initially utilized by educational institutions. When I was born there was no “www”; when I was in high school and getting interested in web design the computer lab had dial-up and Netscape.  The web was brand new.

When the internet first came to the home there was not really any such thing as a web designer or a web developer. There were software engineers, computer programmers, and there were graphic designers.  Many graphic designers had learned the trade before the invention of desktop publishing software.  Art for the computer screen was a new concept. But it certainly made sense in those days to hire a graphic designer to do the design of a website — who could possibly be better qualified among internet pioneers?

That’s hardly the case now – there is a generation of people with experience in and education about the creation of web sites specifically. But in the 1990’s there were no professional web designers who’d dreamed of a web design career as kids; there were just kids starting to dream as they discovered this exciting new medium.  Today those kids have grown up and become professionals.

What is Design?

Design is different from art; design is a problem solving process. You can certainly apply a critical methodology to art, but there is a fundamental difference between an artist’s approach to creation and a designer’s approach to creation. A designer is an artist who approaches the visual medium of their choice in order to solve a problem. An artist has artistic license and does not have to have an articulated purpose, though the nature of art itself defies this sort of generalization.  But a designer has failed if the product does not adequately meet their client’s needs.

Wikipedia states that, “design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. In its broadest sense no other limitations exist and the final product can be anything from clothing to graphical user interfaces to skyscrapers.” Merriam Webster states that a designer designs “for a specific function or end.”  Design is utilitarian at heart; when design is beautiful that beauty serves a mundane purpose.  (Don’t cringe, talk to an artist who doesn’t consider himself a designer — when designing, you’re part artist, but the purity of your art is rarely the only consideration.)

On the web, design involves navigation, graphics, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A well-designed website must tell someone where they are, what is exciting about it, where they can go and make it easy to do those things. If there is content, it must be easy to read, and it is best if the website is accessible to those who use screen readers.  Because a website is not static and visiting a website involves interaction there are different states for many graphical elements (which are difficult to convey in static mock-ups).

The web is a unique medium; most websites grow and evolve. Unlike a graphic designer, whose job is done after the printers roll and who knows his clients will see the same flyer he sees, it is rare that a web designer has the luxury to clap his hands and say, “there, it’s done.” The presentation of a website varies according to the screen, operating system, browser, and plug-ins available to the user. It is all but assured that the content and needs of the site will change to the point that the interface and experience will have to be adjusted.

It is essential that a web designer be equally as invested in the process as it is that a web designer be able to create pretty pictures. If a web designer is unwilling or unable to take into account the technical realities he will be unable to create a superior design. A web designer must not only be adept with graphics, he must have a bone-deep familiarity with rendering engines, an ability to accommodate a range of user experiences by both progressively enhancing and gracefully degrading an interface, and an understanding of the fundamentals SEM and SEO so that the final website is optimized and marketable.

What is Development?

Wikipedia states that, “among web professionals ‘web development’ usually refers only to the non-design aspects of building websites, e.g. writing markup and coding.” If design is a process and a plan, development may be called the execution of that plan. Yet by that measurement, the graphic designer who utilizes InDesign to create a magazine is undertaking graphic development.

Merriam Webster states that to develop is, “to create or produce especially by deliberate effort over time.” This is a concept that is absolutely inseparable from both website design and development, because a website is often like a living organism that creates itself over time. Without new posts, a blog is not a blog; it is the growth and expansion of the blog that makes it a blog.

So how is a web developer distinct from a web designer?  A developer would certainly be expected to undertake more programming than a designer, so he may cite technologies with which he is familiar, “I develop using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL.”  Web development, like web design, is impossible without myriad technologies like servers and databases as well as web programming languages.  Simply viewing a generic WordPress site requires the cooperation of a number of very technical technologies: TCP/IP, a server with Apache installed, an .htaccess file for friendly URLs, PHP, a MySQL database, and HTTP — just to name a few.

A thorough knowledge of all of these is not common — there are network administrators, server administrators, and database administrators for the more esoteric and exacting tasks.  But the average web developer is normally able to set up a development environment of Apache, PHP, and MySQL on his computer and write both SQL queries and PHP code.  He may not be an expert in the HTTP protocol, but he at least knows the cosmetic difference between GET and POST and can utilize them.   Programming in a chosen language is itself is an art form with its own various methodologies and there are concepts like object orientation and model-view-controller architecture that span languages.  Ultimately there are a number of specialties within web development, but there is also unquestionably a breadth of knowledge necessary to develop effectively.

Since I assert that the success of a website design relies on the correctly designed use of all these many front end and back end technologies, what is a web developer?  However essential good web development is to the experience, much of web development is invisible to the viewer.  You can point to a button, but to explain all that is involved in having that button display another page is dizzying to the layman.  Are web developers the blue-collar workers of the web, the ones who construct the masterpieces designed by web designers?  Or is the divide between web design and web development based upon an outdated fallacy that a web site can be separated into “the art parts” versus “the programming parts”?

Again, only with more W’s

It’s a complicated subject to be sure and, possibly for that reason, the titles of “web designer” and “web developer” are applied very inconsistently to web professionals. This inconsistency leads to confusion, job dissatisfaction, and the placement of poorly qualified individuals.

In some offices there may be a room of individuals called “web designers” who use Photoshop to create mock-ups. Once the mock-up is approved the “web design” part of the process is considered complete and it is handed off to the “web developer” who not only writes all the HTML and CSS, but also makes decisions that affect the user experience.

Other businesses may hire employees with the title of “web designer” who use Photoshop, HTML, CSS, and possibly JavaScript to create templates that may lack necessary server-side code, but are complete down to the user experience. In these environments the designer is responsible for designing the entire front-end experience, whether or not he actually writes all the final production front-end code.

You can probably already tell which scenario I favor. As far as I am concerned the first group should not be called web designers. Without utilizing HTML and CSS, how can a designer truly design a website — can an artist draw without using a pencil?  Didn’t the genius painters of the Renaissance mix their own paints?  Don’t graphic designers have to know about printing processes and inks, even if they don’t physically run the printing press to print their posters?  Each visual discipline has “technical” skills associated with it that require more than dreaming in the right brain.  Web design is not an exception, in fact, it is an artistic discipline for which this truth is even more stark and inescapable.

A designer who creates a static mock-up of a website, even one which indicates user interaction, but who does not know through his own abilities what HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can do is not even producing graphic art; he is designing based on what he has seen on other websites.  In short, he is not even exercising creativity, he is copying what others have done. Imagine! “I know we can do a carousel like this because I have seen it on other websites, so ‘insert carousel here.’ No, I don’t have a design for the animation or interaction, because I can’t do more than a static mock-up.”

If I sound harsh, it is because this sort of so-called designer does not even have the defense of artistic integrity; he is a slapdash copycat. A real designer concerned about the quality of his art would consider these details important. Yet an endless series of mock-ups and cumbersome sprites showing the various states of interaction, which would at least meet the minimum criteria I have set, are far from an ideal answer.

The answer is: hire a web designer.