I believe that a good designer will be able to design a website well regardless of their background. this is because any designer worth their salt will research the media they are designing for, and will at least do a little background to understand what is involved in the production of their design.

I have designed for a few different types of media, and web design is the only one type of design that takes me much further into the technical process once the design is finished. If I design for print, a printer prints my work. If I design a sign, a sign maker manufactures my sign. If I design a T-shirt, a t-shirt maker does that for me. What I’m getting at is that after I have understood the process behind it, I let a pro make the design happen, as they are an expert in that field. In web design however, an understanding of CSS/HTML these days seems to translate into a web designer being as much a front end dev as they are a designer. I’m not saying this is wrong, but it can take your eye off the ball in terms of design. This is because you have to go further than just having an interest in that side of things, unless you are lucky enough to have a developer alongside you to look after your coding, but this tends to be a luxury rather than the norm in my experience.

That said not everyone can be brilliant at all kinds of design, and there is where you can flip the argument. I see so many pieces of print design by web designers featuring poor typography, loose layout, and an overall lack of understanding of the printing process. This is along with (a few years ago) overuse of web elements such as gloss or gradients that just don’t work well in print. Usually these pieces of work require considerable tweaking to get ready for print causing just as much headache for print designers as that described in your post.

I took a slightly odd path into my present job doing Graphic Design at Uni then into a job where I was immediately shown how to use Flash which I did for a few years until people started to understand it wasn’t the ‘be-all and end-all’. At this point I gradually started designing and programming (proper) websites using CSS, annoying any programmer that had the misfortune of working with me by adding outer-glows and rounded corners. Over time I have honed my style (and skills) so that I have a good balance between design and CSS possibilites, but I think I’m in the minority.

So many designers don’t understand how a page structure ’should’ look/work and the limitations/possibilities there of, but also so many programmers don’t understand and follow a designers design. I am a designer/programmer, not a programmer/designer, so I understand what CSS can and can’t do. The words I hate hearing from a client is ‘I used to be a designer, so I’d like to design the site myself and then you program it’…………… EEERRRR…. ME DONT FINK SO!!!

Nowadays I tend to leave the CSS programming to the pro’s and get them to program the main structure of things – and they do a LOT better job of it than me!!! But, I think its essential to know what can and can’t be done and most of all – best practices of how to structure things.

It’s not so much that they need to know code, exactly, just that they need to know how to design for the web. It’s a totally different animal than print, and I think the primary point at which print designers fail at web design is accounting for the fluidity and flexibility of the web. Someone will always throw in an extra nav item, or extra bullet point, or extra paragraph, and the design needs to account for that ahead of time.

What shouldn’t have taken much time at all led to the project being about a week late.

The designers who do this, in a web design environment need some sort of basic education on the core principles of coding, just so they have an understanding.