[wpietri]

Great point. Does anybody know the historical origin of the notion that there are "designers" who can be ignorant about their medium?

When I talk to, say, friends who paint, it's a very specific activity for them. They know a lot about actual paints, because they do the painting. Pre-web, I knew people who were print designers, or packaging designers, or logo designers. They too knew the details of their medium intimately.

The two theories I've been able to come with were that a) it's an artifact of the quick rise of the web, where the hunger for various design-related skills quickly pulled in a lot of people, or b) that there was a market niche for design agencies to sell a lot of "design", and so they created the pretense.

Either way, that would put the origin in the early multimedia/web era. But I'm wondering if it goes back further.

[wonderyak]

From my perspective a lot of it has to do with 'training' 'education' and employers. I've worked with several high end agencies and even if some of the designers know some HTML/CSS they have no idea how what they do in PS affects the next stage of the project.

Many employers have no idea about the technical debt of PSD->HTML. Its just the way they've been doing things for years. They hire a designer that can make things look pretty in PS and thats it, their job is done. Its up to the next chump to figure out how to make it work 'Thats what they get paid to do'.

Print designers had to know about processes and techniques because re-printing things is VERY EXPENSIVE. There is a hard cost involved that just doesn't exist on the web. If we make a typo or mistake in something, often we can correct that in a matter of seconds.

A lot of these print designers ended up being used for the web in agencies because they were senior designers, they knew about 'design' and had a lot of experience.

[enobrev]

I've helped convince a few designer friends and colleagues to get into HTML / CSS as they progressed into their careers.

It always seemed to most of them like a daunting leap from the creative application of graphic editors to the very manual text-based tools (and sub-par graphical tools) for rendering designs in a browser. Most would refer to HTML/CSS as "Programming". The majority of their experience and education had been with graphical tools, so the idea of tweaking layout and composition with text was completely foreign.

Most [art] schooling up until about a decade ago was largely based on print design, which means photoshop and illustrator. There may have been a couple classes here and there about building a website, but the vast majority of college level classes for graphic design were all about print and various other analog mediums.

This is actually what eventually led me to drop out of graphic design school in 1998 because it was so far behind the times in terms of web design, which is where I wanted to be.

So with the reluctance of the most talented designers in the industry to learn the medium, it was left to the developers to cover the gap - generally, quite poorly. I've been through plenty of back-and-forth annoyances with print designers - in the very distant past - while they would ask me to tweak pixels that I could hardly bring myself to care about when I had so many other priorities on the project.

For years I'd require any designers I'd worked with to hire "frontend developers" to handle the pixel tweaking and html/css generation, which would eventually start counting against them as the design industry started catching up with the medium.

[WalterSear]

Design as an profession is older than the web - it's older than programming. The industry as a whole is intimidated by modern technology, and appeals to non-technical people.

As a result, many of the people coming out of professional design schools, trained in the esthetics of flat, non-interactive design see themselves as 'above' all that 'computer stuff'. This, combined with intimidation, and a massive demand for good design, keeps them from expanding their skillset.

[rjvin]

> As a result, many of the people coming out of professional design schools, trained in the esthetics of flat, non-interactive design see themselves as 'above' all that 'computer stuff'.

I feel like this doesn't happen so much anymore. At least from recent graduates of top NYC design schools, you'd be hard pressed to find a communication designer / graphic designer who isn't worried about having to learn HTML/CSS because "print is dying".

[wpietri]

My hazy recollection was that at some point people doing flat, non-interactive design called themselves "print designers" or some variant. E.g., magazine designers, book designers. I'm wondering when they dropped the medium-specific notion of design. Are you saying that goes back before the 1950s?