Designer vs Developer

[grandloser]

im studyin become to a web designer myself, and have come across many developers in the industry. and i can barely put them apart.. whats the difference? and how do i know which one i fit into more.

also, id like to raise a question on MS Expression. has anyone used it? how does it rate to other products such as dreamweaver or PS? anyone found a trial version that i can play around with??

[John G]

designer = look and feel, interface, how the user see's it and percieves it.

developer = your backend. PHP, MySQL, all the scripting to our hearts content, AJAX, flex and all the other like.

of course there's grey areas where the two can and do overlap, and you may do both... though all the high paying ones seem to be on the programing side.

And then there's always exceptions. The company I work for calls us designers "developers" (hell I'm a "Multimedia Programmer" and I'm supposed to be doing 3d image work and rendering) because we build the content ( and there's a developer who does the scripting as well, he's also a developer). The "designers" (content developers) develop lesson content.. "the beef" of the project. It was really confusing when I first got there.

[PrintDriver]

id like to raise a question on MS Expression. has anyone used it? how does it rate to other products such as dreamweaver or PS?
Learn to code if you are going to do this for a career.

[morea]

^ no kidding!

you might find this thread helpful:
http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28453

[LittleBlu]

If you end up working freelance, you will need to have both the skills of a designer and a developer in order to compete. I always ask my second-term students, "were you really creative and artistic in highschool - or a math whiz?" (The premise being: creative minds will have to challenge themselves technically and technical minds may have a harder time with design.)

When you start out, I strongly suggest getting into both design and programming. Study design theory and begin to learn code at the same time. DO NOT TOUCH DREAMWEAVER, FRONTPAGE, OR WHIZ-E-WHIGS!!!!!!! --ehm =) code everything by hand in a text editor. I suggest HomeSite, PitPad (free) or BBedit.

Eventually you will begin to excel at one of the two and you will find your niche. If your mind is the type that can handle both equally - you are very lucky!

oh yeah.....that Microsoft stuff - they tried to market it here (Vancouver) by giving out free copies to elite designers over an invitation dinner. Good food, but it wasn't received overly well. My beef is that it is not Mac compatible, so if you are working in a team, OS X only users are kind of screwed.

[grandloser]

yeah im learning coding throughout my studies, its alright im not the best in the course, and im getting the hang of it. but hopefully over the coming years everything will fall into place. lol everybody has been telling me to use DW, as its the industry standard, so why is hand-coding better?

anyway, i've found a free trial version..

http://www.designervsdeveloper.com.au/default.aspx

and, never noticed that the industry is so male-dominated, even though females take up 30% of my class, and its so easy to point out the developers.. they're the daggy looking bunch in comparison to the designers :rolleyes:

[hewligan]

You know, "Don't use Dreamweaver" is quite possibly the worst advice I ever heard.

Firstly because it is the industry standard - and more importantly, the program the people who are interviewing you for a job have heard that you use to produce websites. It depends on where you're interviewing, but it's quite likely that you'll find yourself faced with an interview where it's assumed that not knowing DW means you don't know how to produce a "professional" website.

Secondly because DW's WYSIWYG mode is not nearly as bad as people like to make out. Even if you're mostly handcoding a website, the WYSIWYG mode can come in handy. And it's quite capable of producing good code if you know how to use it properly.

And thirdly because DW is a lot more than just a WYSIWYG editor. It has the best HTML/CSS/PHP editor that I've come across (it also supports other languages, but those are the ones I've used it for). It's site management tools are excellent - and if the rest of your team are using them and you're not, it's going to cause problems. It has good integration features with the other applications you'll probably be using. Fantastic search and replace tools. In-application site validation. A good quality HTML/CSS/many other languages reference built into it. Target checking against many known browser bugs.

Why on Earth wouldn't you use Dreamweaver?

[tZ]

However, being able to code without DW means you truly know your stuff- thats the way I see it. Anyone can fiddle around in dreamweaver here and there and use the hints and whatnot but, it takes much more time and devotion and learn everything in the simplest of forms. Once you know it in the simplest of forms I don't disagree but, I don't think it helps in the beginning stages. Writing things by hand without code hints and stuff helps you to remember things that I don't think you would if you weren't really writing them. At least… thats my opinion.


so why is hand-coding better?


so your not relying on the software. It also helps you to understand basic programming principles which can then be applied to other more complex languages.

[hewligan]

I have plenty of stuff to remember. Besides, things like code hints and tag completion aren't just about not needing to remember stuff - they're also about avoiding errors.

Otherwise, do you have any idea how much time I'd waste needlessly tracking down every place where I'd typed "colour:" by mistake?

[imperez]

Just becuase you use Dreamweaver it doesn't mean you don't know your stuff. It's a tool that can help you if you know how to use it and of course if you know how to code. If you only know one of the two then you're kind of screwed.

[Two-Toe Tom]

well you're not really screwed, you can always learn :)

[imperez]

lol very true.

[hewligan]

You're not screwed because if you know how to use it properly, DW produces perfectly good code.

Illustrator is quite happy to let me produce files that will be absolutely disastrous when they hit the RIP, but I don't do that because I know how to use it properly. By the same token, it is quite possible to use DW to produce bad code (though, these days, it's very hard, when working in WYSIWYG mode, to convince it to produce invalid code). And considering, as I said before, that web designers are frequently expected to work with DW, I'd say you're a lot less screwed if you know how to use DW well but can't hand code than if you know how to hand code but can't use DW.

Realistically, though, you need to know both, and neither is entirely adequate on its own.

[PrintDriver]

The age old, it's not the tool you use, it's how you use it... :)

[Patrick Shannon]

I use Dreamweaver, great code view editor. Rarely use design view if ever, it completely blows up a lot of CSS. Better to use IE and Firefox for proofing, it's not the DW WYSIWYG rendering engine that the web audience is looking at, after all.

[Neballer]

I code in MSPaint - don't ask how, I just do.

[grandloser]

never really had a good memory, but after a while the language/coding does automatically come to me. who ultimately decides what u have to use? urself or the agency your working for?

posted up a picture of myself onto the DvsD site i mentioned earlier, just to see what becomes of it. tried the guessing game aswell, and didn't have too much luck, funny thing is developers tend to look more hairy and are alot easier to peg out.

[SpugNothuson]

developers tend to look more hairy
I must be a designer then at the start of the week and toward the end when my beard grows I become a developer.

Definately a Jack of All Trades.

I would say I'm a Designer then a Developer, need to do both as a Freelancer and a Pre-Press guy.

[grandloser]

Definately a Jack of All Trades.
lol, yeah its the trend to look for people capable of both trades. try posting up ur picture and see what people assume u to be. people are spot on with mine, i have no facial hair, hence designer

[tZ]

^ its the trend because its cheap,lol

More then half the people I talk to that know next to nothing about design think back-end web stuff is graphic design.

[sabian1982]

I personally think most people are either a designer or a developer (me being a designer). I love designing, i love the visual aspect but can't grasp the theories (or remember the theories to be exact) of php/mysql etc. On the flip side i've met/seen to many developers who are a wiz at code, yet can't design to save their lives!

[grandloser]

a creative mind is within a person and you can't learn that i guess. but i believe that if hard work and determination is showed, people still get the rewards.

like the link posted previously, looks like it was designed by a developer imo

[heavyclass]

i like the site, even though it looks more like a game to me. spent a few minutes on the guessing game btw and i scored pretty crap. 43%, only answers 14 of them though

[jtadeo]

...

also, id like to raise a question on MS Expression. has anyone used it? how does it rate to other products such as dreamweaver or PS? anyone found a trial version that i can play around with??

I tried out MS Expression Design and Web and it works ok. I actually built this site www.dawdlepics.com (http://www.dawdlepics.com) (I hand coded the php in Dreamweaver btw).

The key difference with the MS Expression suite is how you can programmatically change the graphics you create on the Web via the Silverlight plugin which works on both Mac and PC browsers. It can export your media assets in a format called XAML. Once in that format you have near absolute control on what it can do or how it can look. It's great for both designers and Web nerds. Ofcourse you can also use SVG to do that and other types of image based server side updates, but Sivlerlight also has a mess-o-stuff that makes it unique from Flash and other app like plugins. One particular note worthy item I liked is how easily you can control the animation and properties of an object all from script.

From the samples I've seen, it is also more desktop-like in the browser vs using server-side script like PHP and ASP/.NET. Ajax, Ruby and Flash all have their way of emulating the desktop experience.

You can download a trial version of MS Expression from here. (http://www.microsoft.com/expression/)

...sip...

[LittleBlu]

Learn to code if you are going to do this for a career.

So if you don't use the design preview features of Dreamweaver...and the WYSIWYG isn't it a rather large text editor? *poke poke!!!!!* (I used to be a big DW fan before it became such a montstrous app. so I'm not innocent either.) From experience teaching web development, the students who jump into dreamweaver at the start lose (or do not gain) ability to hand-code. So we don't let them touch it in the first 6 months of instruction. Instead they use Homesite which can help you with markup and tags without cheating too much. And DW does seem to have a huge issue with CSS. It just doesn't preview properly for some reason if hand-coded rather than WYSIWYG.

It is funny how some designers are just pegged either designers or programmers. It's so true that you can look at some one and often tell. (Though I don't believe that it has to do with whether you shave or not...esp if you are female?) I was told in Uni that I had to choose between print and web. Being a procrastinator, I never did choose and now I am doing illustration, print/prepress, web, development, project management and teaching, lol. --At least there will never be an issue with paying the bills.

[Ned]

(Though I don't believe that it has to do with whether you shave or not...esp if you are female?)

I wear a moustache, no beard. Does that make me half designer, half developer? lol

[heavyclass]

lol moustaches are apart of a beard right? :confused:

[grandloser]

i guess so..

[Cyan_Ide]

I don't trust my fingers enough to use an editor that doesn't syntax highlight.

[tZ]

^… It's not life and death. You can always… well you know correct the mistake.

[PrintDriver]

Whatever works. When it doesn't, best to know why.