[tenaciousDaniel]

I love Brad Frost's work and writing, but I seriously disagree with this.

Imagine being a designer at a place like Netflix. Your product is among the most ubiquitous in the world - if there's a device with any kind of screen, Netflix has an app for it.

Now imagine developing a skillset, as a designer, that totally locks you into one platform (the web in this case). It makes absolutely no sense. I don't care how "easy" React makes things, or how "easy" layout now is with CSS Grid. It takes serious time and effort to develop these skills.

So I ask myself, why would a designer do this? It's one thing to have domain-specific knowledge (iOS design is _very_ different from web, for example). It's another to have implementation-specific knowledge, which IMO a designer really doesn't need.

This is great and all for Netflix's web designers, but what about iOS, Android, Apple TV, Playstation, Xbox, Roku, etc etc etc?

[baddox]

I thought Netflix was pretty notable for using React Native or something similar in most or all of its native apps.

[tenaciousDaniel]

Perhaps. I don't know anything about how Netflix does their design. But the underlying point was that implementation details change, technologies change, and it's hard enough to keep up with the changes while you're focused solely on development.

I'm not opposed to individual designers learning how to code, but my fear is that the industry will come to an expectation that designers should be able to build UI's. I think that's a very very bad idea.

[wolco]

The expectation is already there. I feel sorry for designers who simply worked in html who's lives keep getting more difficult. At one point you drew in photoshop/sliced then you had bootstrap which would give you a base but you needed to override styles.

JSX makes a lot of sense for those writing components but makes little sense for a designer to be forced to think in that way. Using vue with html templates allows designers to copy and paste html.. it's not that easy with jsx..

[seanmcdirmid]

Bigger companies will have more specialized design teams and more developer resources (for prototyping and production) to avoid generalist design-dev needs. This post sounds like they are aiming at smaller shops where designers are much more involved in touching the implemented product.

[jameal]

People are getting stuck on the word "designer." The point isn't that all designers need to be involved in implementation but that the scope of front end _web_ development has grown so wide that it makes sense to split the responsibility between "front of the frontend" and "back of the frontend."