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John Maeda: If You Want to Survive in Design, You Better Learn to Code(wired.com)

over 6 years ago from Benjamin Valmont, Designer

  • Joe ShoopJoe Shoop, over 6 years ago

    Agreed. Being able to write production code (clean, consistent, maintainable, performant, etc) is something that takes a lot of ongoing attention. If you can write production code today, but stop learning the new things, your knowledge will be out of date in a few years.

    But being able to look at a bit of code and have a general idea of what it does is super valuable. You don't need to be able to write it yourself, or even edit it. Just a rough understanding will help so much in communicating with developers and designing things that are reasonable to build.

    10 points
    • Mike MulveyMike Mulvey, over 6 years ago

      YES.

      1 point
    • xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx, over 6 years ago

      Nods head vigorously

      Tools like FramerJS are fun because they enable designers to show a bit more flair and get a bit scrappy in code if they want to, and its really useful for showing complex interactions. But it's whole world away from all the intricacies of a production environment.

      1 point
      • Joe ShoopJoe Shoop, over 6 years ago

        Yes, absolutely! (Sorry just noticed the reply notification from a month ago)

        And if you're writing production quality code for a framer prototype, you're wasting your time. The whole point of prototyping is that it is much faster than actually building the thing. It should be hastily written code that is all copy/pasted and Frankensteined together.

        In fact, I'm not even convinced Framer is the best tool most of the time. It certainly gives you a ton of power to create dynamic, complex prototypes, but something like Principle takes less than half the time and has 90% of the fidelity of a Framer prototype.

        0 points