6 ms·

Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?

23 points by kingsidharth 16y ago

obviator 16y ago
A bigger problem (for developers and designers) is when people don't realise there's a difference between "Client" and "Designer".
pacomerh 16y ago
If you do client work, you gotta be prepared for these questions and more.
j_baker 16y ago
I always say "designers make the site pretty, developers make the site do things". Granted, this still earns me a look of befuddlement, but it's the easiest explanation I can come up with.
- nathos 16y ago
  Actually, I'd say that a proper designer actually designs how your site should work. Developers implement, hack, do backend stuff, etc. "Making a site pretty" is what too many coders think they need a designer for at the end of their projects ("skin my app!"), when perhaps they should be working with real designers from the get-go.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    I think you're describing a user interface engineer with a design background. There is definitely a place for "Person who makes pretty". There is a place for "Person who makes it work well from a human computer interaction persepctive". No reason for it to be the same person.
    - nathos 16y ago
      Agreed. In reality, many developers have plenty of design experience & skill as well. I like to separate design from pure art, subscribing to the Steve Jobs "design is how it works" mentality. To me, design is as much an engineering discipline as an aesthetic one.
      - gte910h 16y ago
        While that is a good definition for the word design, the people who make software pretty usually have an art background where at best they specialize in layout (as a subset of spacing, etc), not user interaction design or industrial design degree. That degree is a thing all to it's own, and what much of the Apple aesthetic comes from. An industrial design degree is actually closer to architecture than art in many programs. There is actual training required to be good at real design for most people. I'm saying most "designers" actually have art training. They might do the job you talk about, and want to do, but they're not the ones trained in it, and not necessarily any more apt at it than the programmer or janitor. Some are quite talented at it. Some aren't. But that doesn't mean their wonderful art isn't incredibly awesome, even though they don't know program flow very well at all. All this isn't saying there can't be tremendous variation in what a person can learn on their own, mind you, but many people do considerably better in something they have a formal background in.
        kiubo 16y ago
        Keep in mind /UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing. I'm a UX designer but when I was in school nothing of the sort was offered. Designing for the internet was just then becoming a concept. Most of my studies were focused on print! I would say that this is true for a lot of interaction designers with more than 5 years under their belt.
        nathos 16y ago
        User Interface design is a new thing? Since when?! UX may be the trendy new term to slap on your CV, but the concepts certainly aren't new. PS: am I the only one who hates the term "User Experience Designer"? User Interfaces can be designed. User Experience can be observed & measured. Personally, I don't think you can truly design a User Experience.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    If they don't know the difference between a designer and a developer, it's much better to start small. Chances are, the other person was only asking to be polite and doesn't really want to know about all the nuances in designers' (or developers') jobs. If they do want to know, I'm happy to go into more detail.
  - noibl 16y ago
    Even just in the context of visual design there is more to it than a continuum of aesthetic quality. A good designer needs to interpret culture and situate the product in relation to an environment in a meaningful way. Others will just follow trends and make things that may be pretty but are also empty and disposable. To say that this is a distinction between art and design I think denigrates both.
- himaniamoli 16y ago
  Design is not all about making things pretty. It's also about making things usable.
- ThomPete 16y ago
  Saying that designers make the site pretty and developers make the site do things is exactly the kind of thinking that makes this whole thing a mess. The "pretty" parts is such a small part of what design is all about. I don't just create some skin on top of some application, I help create the underlying structure maybe even the business logic. Also developers are not just making the things work. They are actually constructing the code space by making decisions that are based on some aesthetic principles. When you construct your code in a certain way it's not just rational it is as much emotional. To give you an example of what design also is. We recently managed to convince a bank to put some of the knowledge they had about their clients into play. Basically all transaction come with a unique vendor number that can be paired up to a category (utilities, groceries, insurance etc) and allow customers without having to type in a single thing to see how they spend their money. The original design I did was nice and cool and all, the final design ended up looking rather pale in comparison, but it's one of the things I have done in my life that I am most proud off. It took not only knowledge about how some of the innnerworkings of banking, it took political fights, fights with IT departments and so on. But the results where phenomenal. People loved it and I neither they cared that it wasn't as sassy as I had originally intended. Design is not just about how it looks, it's as much about how it works.
  - arctangent 16y ago
    Part of the problem in understanding what everyone means is that the word "design" is quite ambiguous these days. I'm a programmer working in web "development", and some of the things you lay claim to (UX, UI) are things that I'm responsible for rather than our "designer". So I guess there's really a spectrum of different types of activity (rather than a binary partition) and the choice of who gets what responsibility is a local one. Some organisations have people who have exotic job titles with words such as "User Experience" and "Information Architecture" in them. I suspect that "designers" and "developers" in those organisations have much more clearly separated roles.
    - ThomPete 16y ago
      Oh I agree. I dont' really see them fundamentally as different. I was just pointing out stuff I was also doing which could might as well have been done by a developer (in fact I worked with a couple developers on setting up the proper architecture)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Andrewski 16y ago
Designers use a GUI tool like Dreamweaver, or do not code at all. Developers can make a program or web site using a text editor.
- kiubo 16y ago
  This it a lot less true today than it would have been several years ago. I'm a designer and most of the younger designer's I know are comfortable programming in several languages. Anyway, your statement is an oversimplification. You could also say that the website the designer made would have better usability and be more engaging for the users (but perhaps buggy), while the developer would have a well coded site that no one (except maybe other developers) would want to use.
  - Andrewski 16y ago
    You aren't a designer if you actually produce code. If you "can" code but do not, and use dreamweaver or a similar drawing to code tool, then yeah, you are a designer.
Ogre 16y ago
In game development, we're all developers. Designers, programmers and artists are subsets of developer. Maybe producers too depending who you ask. They're certainly part of the development team. Is that not how it is everywhere else? In my brief non-gaming employment, I don't think the word "developer" really came up.
pestaa 16y ago
I have a bad experience in this regard. At my last startup, I was regularly asked to hack HTML and CSS because the site constantly got ugly. Not that I couldn't do it, but there was a designer who was hired every month or two to do bigger chunks of fixing. It meant she added 42 divs for each bug so it looked "ok". Good designers are extremely hard to come by.
tintin 16y ago
There are developer designers and 'artists'. There are developer designers and 'nerds'.
romaniv 16y ago
There are people who specialize on drawing things, and there are people who specialize on API-level programming. However, I'm a firm believer that a developer who creates programs to be used by humans has to have designer mentality as well. Trivial example: if your web app doesn't allow bookmarking and breaks browser history, that's a usability issue. But you can't fix it at the end of development process, it's something you have to be conscious about from the start.
sev 16y ago
There's a big difference. Designers create a visible element (it's look, layout, color, position, etc.), developers code what that element does when a user interacts with it.
brackin 16y ago
Good designers don't make good web designers, designers control how the application will work and feel as they are the designer.

23 points by kingsidharth 16y ago

A bigger problem (for developers and designers) is when people don't realise there's a difference between "Client" and "Designer".

pacomerh 16y ago

If you do client work, you gotta be prepared for these questions and more.

j_baker 16y ago

I always say "designers make the site pretty, developers make the site do things". Granted, this still earns me a look of befuddlement, but it's the easiest explanation I can come up with.

nathos 16y ago
Actually, I'd say that a proper designer actually designs how your site should work. Developers implement, hack, do backend stuff, etc. "Making a site pretty" is what too many coders think they need a designer for at the end of their projects ("skin my app!"), when perhaps they should be working with real designers from the get-go.
- gte910h 16y ago
  I think you're describing a user interface engineer with a design background. There is definitely a place for "Person who makes pretty". There is a place for "Person who makes it work well from a human computer interaction persepctive". No reason for it to be the same person.
  - nathos 16y ago
    Agreed. In reality, many developers have plenty of design experience & skill as well. I like to separate design from pure art, subscribing to the Steve Jobs "design is how it works" mentality. To me, design is as much an engineering discipline as an aesthetic one.
    - gte910h 16y ago
      While that is a good definition for the word design, the people who make software pretty usually have an art background where at best they specialize in layout (as a subset of spacing, etc), not user interaction design or industrial design degree. That degree is a thing all to it's own, and what much of the Apple aesthetic comes from. An industrial design degree is actually closer to architecture than art in many programs. There is actual training required to be good at real design for most people. I'm saying most "designers" actually have art training. They might do the job you talk about, and want to do, but they're not the ones trained in it, and not necessarily any more apt at it than the programmer or janitor. Some are quite talented at it. Some aren't. But that doesn't mean their wonderful art isn't incredibly awesome, even though they don't know program flow very well at all. All this isn't saying there can't be tremendous variation in what a person can learn on their own, mind you, but many people do considerably better in something they have a formal background in.
      - kiubo 16y ago
        Keep in mind /UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing. I'm a UX designer but when I was in school nothing of the sort was offered. Designing for the internet was just then becoming a concept. Most of my studies were focused on print! I would say that this is true for a lot of interaction designers with more than 5 years under their belt.
        nathos 16y ago
        User Interface design is a new thing? Since when?! UX may be the trendy new term to slap on your CV, but the concepts certainly aren't new. PS: am I the only one who hates the term "User Experience Designer"? User Interfaces can be designed. User Experience can be observed & measured. Personally, I don't think you can truly design a User Experience.
- j_baker 16y ago
  If they don't know the difference between a designer and a developer, it's much better to start small. Chances are, the other person was only asking to be polite and doesn't really want to know about all the nuances in designers' (or developers') jobs. If they do want to know, I'm happy to go into more detail.
- noibl 16y ago
  Even just in the context of visual design there is more to it than a continuum of aesthetic quality. A good designer needs to interpret culture and situate the product in relation to an environment in a meaningful way. Others will just follow trends and make things that may be pretty but are also empty and disposable. To say that this is a distinction between art and design I think denigrates both.
himaniamoli 16y ago
Design is not all about making things pretty. It's also about making things usable.
ThomPete 16y ago
Saying that designers make the site pretty and developers make the site do things is exactly the kind of thinking that makes this whole thing a mess. The "pretty" parts is such a small part of what design is all about. I don't just create some skin on top of some application, I help create the underlying structure maybe even the business logic. Also developers are not just making the things work. They are actually constructing the code space by making decisions that are based on some aesthetic principles. When you construct your code in a certain way it's not just rational it is as much emotional. To give you an example of what design also is. We recently managed to convince a bank to put some of the knowledge they had about their clients into play. Basically all transaction come with a unique vendor number that can be paired up to a category (utilities, groceries, insurance etc) and allow customers without having to type in a single thing to see how they spend their money. The original design I did was nice and cool and all, the final design ended up looking rather pale in comparison, but it's one of the things I have done in my life that I am most proud off. It took not only knowledge about how some of the innnerworkings of banking, it took political fights, fights with IT departments and so on. But the results where phenomenal. People loved it and I neither they cared that it wasn't as sassy as I had originally intended. Design is not just about how it looks, it's as much about how it works.
- arctangent 16y ago
  Part of the problem in understanding what everyone means is that the word "design" is quite ambiguous these days. I'm a programmer working in web "development", and some of the things you lay claim to (UX, UI) are things that I'm responsible for rather than our "designer". So I guess there's really a spectrum of different types of activity (rather than a binary partition) and the choice of who gets what responsibility is a local one. Some organisations have people who have exotic job titles with words such as "User Experience" and "Information Architecture" in them. I suspect that "designers" and "developers" in those organisations have much more clearly separated roles.
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    Oh I agree. I dont' really see them fundamentally as different. I was just pointing out stuff I was also doing which could might as well have been done by a developer (in fact I worked with a couple developers on setting up the proper architecture)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Andrewski 16y ago

Designers use a GUI tool like Dreamweaver, or do not code at all. Developers can make a program or web site using a text editor.

kiubo 16y ago
This it a lot less true today than it would have been several years ago. I'm a designer and most of the younger designer's I know are comfortable programming in several languages. Anyway, your statement is an oversimplification. You could also say that the website the designer made would have better usability and be more engaging for the users (but perhaps buggy), while the developer would have a well coded site that no one (except maybe other developers) would want to use.
- Andrewski 16y ago
  You aren't a designer if you actually produce code. If you "can" code but do not, and use dreamweaver or a similar drawing to code tool, then yeah, you are a designer.

Ogre 16y ago

In game development, we're all developers. Designers, programmers and artists are subsets of developer. Maybe producers too depending who you ask. They're certainly part of the development team. Is that not how it is everywhere else? In my brief non-gaming employment, I don't think the word "developer" really came up.

pestaa 16y ago

I have a bad experience in this regard. At my last startup, I was regularly asked to hack HTML and CSS because the site constantly got ugly. Not that I couldn't do it, but there was a designer who was hired every month or two to do bigger chunks of fixing. It meant she added 42 divs for each bug so it looked "ok". Good designers are extremely hard to come by.

tintin 16y ago

There are developer designers and 'artists'. There are developer designers and 'nerds'.

romaniv 16y ago

There are people who specialize on drawing things, and there are people who specialize on API-level programming. However, I'm a firm believer that a developer who creates programs to be used by humans has to have designer mentality as well. Trivial example: if your web app doesn't allow bookmarking and breaks browser history, that's a usability issue. But you can't fix it at the end of development process, it's something you have to be conscious about from the start.

sev 16y ago

There's a big difference. Designers create a visible element (it's look, layout, color, position, etc.), developers code what that element does when a user interacts with it.

brackin 16y ago

Good designers don't make good web designers, designers control how the application will work and feel as they are the designer.