I read this Zlog interview with David Shea, and, while I respect his opinion a great deal, vehemently disagree with one point.

Which languages interest you the most and why?

None of ‘em, and here’s my reason.

I spend a good chunk of my day in Photoshop or Illustrator or whichever graphic tool I’m using at the time. The common thread between the various design packages from Adobe, Macromedia, and Quark are that they all rely on underlying data structures (including PostScript in some cases) that enable me to build my imagery with WYSIWYG tools.

Not once, ever, do I even have the option of looking at the code. I’m kept as far away from it as possible, and let the control over it stay where it belongs - in the capable hands of the software.

This is an incorrect analogy because the designers (engineers) of Photoshop did have access to the code and were in complete control of every behavior in the Photoshop environment. The end user of the design tool shouldn’t care about the underlying code for the same reason that an end user of a web site shouldn’t be exposed to its code. But those designing should care a great deal.

And that’s the way it should be with the web. It makes no sense for a designer to code; they should design. The fundamental layout of a page should be completely hidden from the person building it, otherwise it stifles their creativity.

I’m making the assumption that code = HTML/markup and not logic.

When you’re designing a web site you’re also (intentionally or not) designing the behavior — the way the page behaves inside the browser and the interaction of the page to the user. How else can you accurately control the design of your product if you’re not constructing the pieces that make up the layout? Sitting behind the coder dictating every nuance just doesn’t cut it. This behavior design comes through subtly in the structure: fixed versus variable width pages greatly affect the design; or blatantly: rollover images, opening new browser sessions in hrefs, etc.

When I start adapting my layout to fit a design I know I can code, the tools are getting in the way of my creativity.

Web design is the only design discipline in which the designer can also build from start to finish. Not in print design (usually), industrial design or architecture are they so lucky. If you follow some variation of the Sketchpad -> Illustrator -> Photoshop -> HTML editor process, eliminating the last step of the design process is not suppressing design, but following it through into a realized product. This amount of design control should not be wasted. Even if it’s just the initial templates to be chopped up and reapportioned by a web programmer, those templates serve as the foundation of the site from which all coding and structure follows. Obviously one should never begin any project by coding HTML.

How would a designer know what was possible as a web design layout without knowing the code? Early in my career print designers would offer advice on specific designs that were not at all transferrable to the web, with (graphical) fonts spanning photos intersecting body copy that was impossible in 3.0 browsers and impractical in today’s updated browsers because they were ignorant to how the pages were laid out and how the code worked.

This is how its still done at design agencies all the time and is a completely foreign concept to me. Throughout jobs at large and small companies I’ve been fortunate enough to have never belonged to a creative team larger than six or seven people and have avoided assembly-line design entirely. Maybe I’m just a control freak — I don’t trust others to fully execute my design vision for a site and maintain structural integrity when the “site builders” join the game in the fourth quarter. But to me, web design is a bridge between art and science where design and code are inseparable elements of the media in which we’re communicating.