Comment by CPops | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CPops | Hacker News Reader

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Very interesting, but if you take a minute to step back and think about it for a bit, I think you would find that your experience at Apple doesn't represent the typical designer/developer/business interaction. You are in fact talking about an ideal situation for designers there. Regarding what I've read about Apple's design process, Apple affords the resources to allow for multiple mockups, design experimentation, and other practices that aren't as common in startups or most of the working world. Please share more about how things work there if you can.

However, when you're working with a startup for instance, as I have had the opportunity to do for my previous few gigs, you're dealing with finite financial resources as I'm sure you realize. Talking about limitations and how long something takes to build and everything is the difference between launching or not launching before the money runs out. When you're living in that world, focusing on the limitations of the platform and finding ways to solve problems with minimal resources and in a small amount of time is often what the businesses primary problem is.

I recognize that these are important qualities in certain environments (such as a startup). Similarly, with limited resources we may also find ourselves skimping on the engineering end as well. However, I was simply responding to the original comment which was:

  If you don't know CSS, you're not a web designer and have no business building websites to begin with. You can't design properly for a medium which has limitations you don't understand.

My response to this was simply that no, you can be a fantastic web designer without knowing CSS, and perhaps even better. Maybe your skills would not translate well in certain environments, but to go from that to criticizing said designer and saying he has no place on the web is frivolous.

The Apple design approach works if you're building a platform from the ground up. If you're trying to produce reliable results on someone else's platform, you need to understand any hard limitations it has, because you aren't going to be able to fix them. The closer an HTML+CSS document gets to rocket science, the more environments in which it fails to render even usably, much less the way you were hoping it might.

I don't think anyone would accept a print designer being completely ignorant of what is feasible with ink on paper, especially if you are going to be using mass-produced ink in one of various worn-in press someone else is operating.

Well, I agree with you. It is physically possible to be a fantastic web designer without knowing how to write any sort of code. But I have found that this combination of talents is extremely rare in practice. Generally a non-coding web-designer is a good graphic designer and good with Photoshop, but is actually a very mediocre web-designer.

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