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Those two opposing viewpoints on a designer's role probably have a lot to do with the type of application you are designing. If I was doing the hiring, I would
by po 17y ago
Those two opposing viewpoints on a designer's role probably have a lot to do with the type of application you are designing. If I was doing the hiring, I would expect more template language understanding for a web application than from marketing or traditional web site.
I think it's fair for him to say he wouldn't ever hire a designer like that but I think it's because he's only built sites where it makes sense to optimize for that.
- tptacek 17y agoWhy on earth would you want to narrow your options? There are dozens of template languages. Why would you want to spend one cent extra, or sacrifice one extra cent of quality, to find a designer who was not only skilled in information design, graphic design, typography, and interaction design, but also Django (or Erb or PHP or Clearsilver) literate?
- blasdel 17y agoDjango templates are significantly different than all the other ones you mentioned. It was architected from the beginning to be friendly to non-programmers -- the idea was that someone writing an article for the Lawrence Journal-World (or a designer) could easily use custom templating in a constrained templating language that developers can augment with custom tags and filters. It surprisingly works incredibly well for that use case. The templating language strictly enforces view-separation -- the template author can't do anything the developer didn't intentionally let them do. It can be ridiculously frustrating if you're expecting it to be a normal language -- for instance __getitem__, __getattr__, and __call__ all use the same "obj.property: arg" syntax. It calls hasattr at every call site to figure this out, and you can't use () or [] even if you wanted to. Fuck, you can't pass multiple arguments to a function!