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I think there are more designers than coders because the barrier to entry is far lower. Anyone can easily start designing by picking up "HTML for Dummies". It i

I think there are more designers than coders because the barrier to entry is far lower. Anyone can easily start designing by picking up "HTML for Dummies". It isn't going to be close to pretty but it will be published. Ask those guys to deploy something through the command line with Capistrano or rsync though and they'll look at you like you're speaking another language. It's harder to start programming. The basics might be easy at first but to build anything useful takes a lot of practice. Programming is also less forgiving. You can publish ugly brochureware easily but getting any significant program written and running is a pain as one mistake and it's throwing incomprehensible errors at the newbie programmer.

untog 15y ago
See, my first instinct is to agree with you, but I don't know. Maybe we just say these things because we know programming and not design. Meanwhile someone on a design forum is saying: " Anyone can easily start programming by picking up "Ruby for Dummies". Ask those guys to <do a design-specific task> or <adhere to a design principle I know nothing about> and they'll look at you like you're speaking another language." Maybe I'm wrong, though.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  You're right but I think we're talking about two different things. I consider myself a generalist doing both design and programming but I don't have any formal training in the art of design. So yeah, it will seem foreign to me when someone starts speaking about white space, color theory, and all that. What I'm talking about is the fact that anyone with little effort at all can code some HTML and CSS because they're far more forgiving. The results may come out like crap but most people (myself included) don't know good design anyway and so they end up calling themselves web designers based on some simple HTML tutorial. Getting a programming language to print out text is one thing but ask someone to do something useful. Nobody picks up a book on Ruby and builds a blog on the first try. Even the 20 minute blog tutorial is too high a barrier to entry for people without programming experience. "Design" languages like HTML and CSS are more about memorization. Memorize the tags and syntax and you can start building and publishing crap in a few days. Programming is different. Not only do you have to memorize the syntax but you also have to apply some logic to it as well. Programming is about problem solving whereas design is about describing output. Even the examples you'll find in books don't help unless you're trying to build the exact thing as the examples otherwise you have to actually understand the underlying concepts to get a program that suits your specific needs. Neither one is easier than the other, I will not say that. First off, it's far easier for the unqualified to call the,slaves designers than programmer. But just because it's easier to enter the design realm doesn't make it easy. Once you have a grasp of both programming and design you'll find out that both are quite complex and interconnected. Those "designers" that haven't discovered that yet are the ones I'm talking about and they're the ones I'm basing my premise of design having a lower barrier to entry on.

untog 15y ago

See, my first instinct is to agree with you, but I don't know. Maybe we just say these things because we know programming and not design. Meanwhile someone on a design forum is saying: " Anyone can easily start programming by picking up "Ruby for Dummies". Ask those guys to <do a design-specific task> or <adhere to a design principle I know nothing about> and they'll look at you like you're speaking another language." Maybe I'm wrong, though.

billpatrianakos 15y ago
You're right but I think we're talking about two different things. I consider myself a generalist doing both design and programming but I don't have any formal training in the art of design. So yeah, it will seem foreign to me when someone starts speaking about white space, color theory, and all that. What I'm talking about is the fact that anyone with little effort at all can code some HTML and CSS because they're far more forgiving. The results may come out like crap but most people (myself included) don't know good design anyway and so they end up calling themselves web designers based on some simple HTML tutorial. Getting a programming language to print out text is one thing but ask someone to do something useful. Nobody picks up a book on Ruby and builds a blog on the first try. Even the 20 minute blog tutorial is too high a barrier to entry for people without programming experience. "Design" languages like HTML and CSS are more about memorization. Memorize the tags and syntax and you can start building and publishing crap in a few days. Programming is different. Not only do you have to memorize the syntax but you also have to apply some logic to it as well. Programming is about problem solving whereas design is about describing output. Even the examples you'll find in books don't help unless you're trying to build the exact thing as the examples otherwise you have to actually understand the underlying concepts to get a program that suits your specific needs. Neither one is easier than the other, I will not say that. First off, it's far easier for the unqualified to call the,slaves designers than programmer. But just because it's easier to enter the design realm doesn't make it easy. Once you have a grasp of both programming and design you'll find out that both are quite complex and interconnected. Those "designers" that haven't discovered that yet are the ones I'm talking about and they're the ones I'm basing my premise of design having a lower barrier to entry on.