Stieve Hansen

The graphic designer / coder duality, well I think many of you have had this problem, take for example, What defines Graphic Designer? And what defines a Coder?

Graphic Designers

• They work with mostly graphic programs such as Photoshop, Fireworks, After effects and such, anything that helps  to reach a final Graphical Solution.
• Usual works are logotypes, design a layout and functionality for a web page, billboards and flyer’s.
• They study colors, forms and the effects of these on people (a form of Sociology ), also practice drawing skills and illustrative skills.
• Anything has a visual form, an example is to listen to a music and import it to a piece of paper or a graphical work.
• Pass a message trough an image.

Coders

• I think of coders as the backbone of any design that needs gears to work, such as a webpage.
• They study various languages / coding types, such as Java, Action Scripts, c++ and so on.
• They bring solutions in terms of functionality, anything digital had a coder behind it.

With that said, here is the duality, I always struggled to make coding and luckily today I can some basic languages, such as XML, CSS, HTML and some Action scripting, every designer should know at least the basics of the most fundamentals coding for web design.
For two fundamentals reasons,

• So that when you hire a coder you at least know what you are talking about and the limitations of each language.
• It’s not always necessary to know the the whole language to make a web page, if you can do it yourself, the better.

Common sense makes people think that a designer should know every single language and know it well, so that he can make it himself, well I understand why they would say that, imagine if you knew something about everything, then you knew a lot of different things, but, you never knew anything deeply enough, you not really good at something.

The greatest minds where really good at something.

With that said imagine how far you could go with team work, you really good with creativity and the coder really good with coding, instead of both being half good at both.

So to achieve greatness, you should practice in what you already are good at, and team up with other people with different talents, we live in earth as an organism, and co-operation is the way to go, and i cant see a graphic designer going really far if they don’t team up.