If you're a digital designer (web/mobile app/interface) I think you should be interested in code, but by no means do you have to learn to code.

Mike, your advice is well-intentioned, and, at least for today, spot-on. However, with the way technology advances and competition, for both business and employees, becomes much more fierce, it'd be a mistake for a designer not to add Coding Skills to their arsenal. In 1-2 years from today it could be the difference between providing a good life for your family and living from paycheck to paycheck.

It's like telling a print designer they had better learn to create their own typefaces.

For me it's more like telling a Print designer they'd better learn how to design for the Web. I know many who were left behind because they couldn't adapt to a new environment in which design was flexible and iterative, rather than static.

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 If you can write production code today, but stop learning the new things, your knowledge will be out of date in a few years.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.

Hi, I'm a print designer turned UX and I can create my own typefaces.

I think the better analogy is telling print designers to understand paper, and how printing presses work, or other printing methods. It's the manifestation of the designers work in the real world.

Understanding paper weights, how separations work, which colors lead to oversaturation, etc. all help the designer become better at their craft and avoid unintended side-effects.

I feel it's the same way with code. It's the same manifestation from concept to reality and leads to a better understanding of the medium you're working with.

Another case for the downvote button.

Should designers design?

Farmers should know how to build their own tractors.

Writing code is not design.

With all the recent advancements from Adobe (see here: https://www.fastcodesign.com/3068884/adobe-is-building-an-ai-to-automate-web-design-should-you-worry) to automate both the coding AND the design process to an extent, I think these primary design skills—while having the foundational knowledge to know why things do or do not work together—is on its way out the door. I mean, just look at what happened to photography? These days, auto crop and white balance tools can make an 8-year-old's photograph look like it was taken on a DSLR by a seasoned vet. That said, I think originality is going to be the next frontier. How can we work with automated processes and still stand out above the noise? I'm not saying I'm right by any means, but this is just where all the obvious arrows seem to be pointing.

But ma' exposure!

That is another good question. How long is the professional life of a designer? It´s something that really concerns me, because you really think than all the designer of the world can became creative directors? There is no place for everybody. I´m trying to find my B-plan but maybe, this is something that should be explained to the students when they are young. "Hey, you can´t be a designer your whole live, In the future, when you will be 50yo you are going to be too old to work, think about that"

It seems to me that the natural path is to move towards strategy/operations as you get older. These are two things that young designers don't do as well as more experienced designers – frankly, they don't seem interested in this stuff.

I think a working knowledge of engineering technology is always helpful but there really is no need to be proficient; leave it up to the pros. Learn just enough to have a good conversation about engineering.

If you can use some specific framework for designers, like framer.js, it doesn`t mean you know how programming. It means you know framer.js and it is all.

See how devs (the less talented ones) react when you come to them with something made in one of these frameworks. They flip their shit if you work in something that doesn't tow the line in their framework du jour

Do you consider design as a practice to be something that requires you to be a lifelong learner of tools, best practices, trends, methods, and schools of thought?

Do you believe coding is not also this?

Do you believe it should be the responsibility of a designer to think both creatively and in the almost entirely opposite fashion in not only learning to code, but following the developments in the field and be a lifelong learner and practitioner? Do you think, then, that a designer should essentially be an expert in two rather different entire careers?

The idea that "coding" is simply a skill one can pick up like "hand lettering" and simply toss that in their skillset seems ridiculous and insulting to developers. Sure, one can learn an amount of code and utilize it — but is there no value in being a specialist? Is there no room to have other hobbies and areas of interest?

I for one engage frequently in consuming information and thought in the areas of psychology, philosophy, politics, narrative theory — all of which, I believe, in some way expand my knowledge of the others and supplement the way I think about design. Should I instead spend that time learning code, then learning new languages and technologies?

Should I stop taking time for myself? My family?

I don't think there's much a debate about whether designers should code, I think it's more a matter of how much and what they should be responsible for. I absolutely think that designers should code and that a designer that codes well is best set for their future.

That being said, I think we're at a tipping point both with where Javascript is going, and how designers can contribute. I think it was far easier to start out as a hybrid designer a few years ago when many sites didn't use front end frameworks, relied on jQuery for everything, and hybrid designers were more or less given a bunch of templates used on the back end and told to much with those.

Now everything is an isomorphic web app, everything is React, or Vue, or whatever. Everything will be ES6 and use compilers. If you are a large service, eventually everything will be React components that transpool down to their React Native and React JS equivalents. I think it's going to be increasingly difficult to find designers who can contribute scripts for theses sorts of projects, and, in my experience, if a designer excels in these areas then they may not find themselves being deployed as a designer for much longer, favored instead for engineering work.

I think that instead, we should be preparing designers to prototype, to work with hard data sets, to expect them to design for interaction and for null states, and none of that really requires coding. I think you're just more cognizant of them if you're also a developer, but that understanding can be trained.