They're letting designers code now?
Dave Shea, author of CSS Zen Garden was a morning speaker at An Event Apart 2009.
What separates visual design tools from coding tools? The best way to establish visual thinking is by using "GUIs".
You need a source-code view, syntax-highlighting text editor. A very cool tool that Dave Shea showed us how to redesign a website on the fly by sampling the colors of a photo on a page, sending it to Photoshop to get color data then applying them to HTML elements by dynamically applying them to a CSS file.
This is a cool idea, but it could be faster. He could use ImageMagick on the PHP side and get the CSS values all in one shot.
Should designers code? :)
Shea then spoke about "user interface" design. Instead of designing a single page, we are building interfaces.
Once JQuery became more usable, designers could start implementing Javascript a lot easier. But it can be dangerous if they don't start following good coding practices.
2010 is a really exciting time on the web. As a front-end client-side engineer, there is a bucket of CSS tricks that we should all know about by using progressive enhancement.
- opacity - element {opacity:[0-1.0]}
- text-shadow - element {text-shadow: top left width color}
- box-shadow - element {box-shadow: top left shadow color}
- border-radius - element {border-radius: [all] top left bottom right}
- @font-face - This is not the most performance-friendly method, but it's the easiest. Typekit is the standard now, but there will be competition. FontSquirrel lists all of the best free open-sourced fonts.
The <canvas> tag is all Javascript. Once designers unlock the knowledge to write object-oriented user interfaces in JS, we won't be able to use the <canvas> tag. We are better off learning Processing JS.
Webkit is not on mobile, so we are kinda stuck.
CSS 3 and HTML 5 are awesome drafts, but it will be a while before the Microsoft team catches up to the development cycle of the rest of the web.
In the meantime, yes, designers should learn how to code. They become a new level of designer when they learn to use web standards and practices.
I consider myself "in-the-middle" just like everyone else who works on the display layer of the web. The best part is the learning process.
Shea had some really good points, but I think we need to work harder as designers to get our hands dirty in the code.
More from Event Apart 2009: