"Do designers need to learn JavaScript?" is a popular question, but what does "learning JavaScript" mean precisely? And why would you ask this ques...
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What makes web development really difficult to learn is the carelessness with which framework designers create new language concepts. Each framework comes with it´s own syntax, own concepts and own inconsistencies. And usually nothing you write for React can be used in Svelte and vice versa. And often enough documentation is incomplete, outdated or written in a way, that beginners cannot understand.
If you focus on systems that have good, user-friendly documentation and a good test environment, this can save ton´s of time and prevent frustration.
This is one of the reasons I love Astro. You are able to code in basic JS and use your components from all those other frameworks. I use components from vue, react and svelte all together.
I wrote an article highlighting one of my Astro templates, The Astro SSR SPA Template. You can also keep up with our Astro projects at my Blog.
Hi! I'm primarly a web designer but I also use Webflow for development.
I think that every designer should have some basic knowldege of HTML/CSS and how the web works in general. I know a lot of designer that simply refuse to learn even a bit of code because they're DESIGNERS. It's silly to me. And it goes both ways. Developers should know some basics of design.
"CSS: underrated, powerful, and (un)forgiving" HA! I loved this description, it's so true.
While I don't think they have to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, it's always a good idea for designers to learn how those languages work. Likewise, it's useful for us front-end developers to learn at least the basics of design.
Collaboration is key, you're right.
But while I used to think designers benefitted from learing code and developers from design principles, I don't think that so much any more.
UX team does the UX, design team does the design, dev team does the implementation. It's a nice-to-have to know how the other side(s) live, but if you're at the point where the developer has to say, "this colour isn't contrasty enough", then sure, it's a good catch, but the failure is upstream.
Collaboration at the key milestones - especially right at the start - fixes most things.
I'm a developer, who absolutely sucks at designing. I sit at my laptop like wtf will I make? If you show me a design, well then I can code it into existence, I just need the assets(images, graphics, etc.) but coming up with it from scratch, kinda hard for me, again I'm not a designer!
I truly don't mean to be dismissive of the question asked in your article title, but I think most would agree that the answer is, "Do what interests you." I worked closely with a design team years ago that included both Design Techs (designers who can at least code prototypes) and UX Designers. With one exception, the UX Designers had no interest in coding, so they focused strictly on designing. The Design Techs obviously had an interest in the technical side.
It was a very high-functioning team, and I think that was largely because the team members were encouraged to follow their interests. Among the DT's, there were variations in their skill sets (some great at JS, some at CSS, some both), and the designers had different areas of experience and expertise. (I really miss working with that design team ☹️.)
On a separate note, I have a friendly suggestion regarding your article title. I actually thought you were saying something other than what you meant when I first read the title. Some people say "web designer" when they mean "web developer", and when I saw "JavaScript or CSS", I thought you were saying "Should a new web developer focus on JS, or should they focus on CSS?" I think it'd remove ambiguity if you instead entitled your article something like, "Should UX designers learn JavaScript and CSS?"
I think it really necessary for ever web developer to understand basics of css and js, you might encounter some cases that you wanna re- develop or fixed some issues in the website the the site consist of css and js. So it's necessary to understand at least basics of css and how it works.
I think the web browsers these days are signifficantly more powerful then they used to be and CSS offers many things a Figma canvas will never have (unless Figma implements it). So yes, I think designers should design in code, but not necessarily code. Which is why I am building handover.zip
Nice read!
Thank you so much for your in-depth analysis. I appreciate how EchoAPI facilitates seamless communication between APIs and CSS frameworks, greatly enhancing the overall development process.