My Hate Blog

Perhaps a few days to a week ago, I got into a little ‘heated’ discussion on IRC about web design and web development. The argument surrounded what constitutes web design and web development. Essentially, my argument was that if you approach someone to perform web design services for you, why the fuck are you left with a PSD file and advised to create the HTML/CSS/XHTML yourself? Surely this, in itself, is a web design job, no? Web design in the sense of that they must then create the HTML which is supported across various browsers and thus their original design is made compatible for the web.
Needless to say that almost everyone on that IRC channel was convinced that a designers job is “complete” once they hand you a design. They then went on to say that it’s a web developers job to take said design and create the HTML, and the development code in order to make the website.

This, my friends, is complete bullshit. According to Wikipedia and this link they describe web design as the following, and I quote:

“Web design is the design of web pages, websites and web applications using HTML, CSS, images, and other media.”

You read that correctly? “using HTML, CSS, images and other media”. So by Wikipedia’s very definition, this includes the lazy ass web designer providing you with compliant HTML/XHTML or whatever other browser-viewable code you want, so that you can begin web development on it.

I am a web developer. I code in PHP, a little javascript, a little Perl. What I do not do, however, is any form of design. There’s an almost unwritten rule in the world of programming and development; programmers should not do design. We are logical thinkers, we practically think in code. We create applications so that make your shitty designs operate in a fantastic way. We breathe life into your pre-existing static designs. Why, then, would you expect us to take your fucking graphic and make it into a website?

For those of you who think HTML is code, it’s not. Whilst it may stand for “Hyper-text Markup Language”, it’s not strictly a programming language. It’s static, there are no loops, no variables, no evaluations taking place. It’s simply a language used to place text and images on the screen. You can get a little more advanced than this and start adding style-sheets and perhaps a little bit of javascript for image rollovers and what not. But that’s it.

Back in ‘the day’ at the birth of the ‘Internet Revolution’, if you paid a web designer to produce you a design, you would receive a completed HTML package ready for uploading and viewing by the masses. That was how it was done. So why then has the sudden change come about, in which web design now crosses the bounadies with graphic design? If I wanted a fucking mockup of my website in an image format, I’d hire a graphic designer to do it for me. Because that, by definition, is what you’re providing the client. A graphic, nothing more, nothing less. This in my opinion is the height of laziness. Anyone who dares call themselves a web designer and does this should be fucking shot, and downgrade their profession to ‘graphic monkey’. Even my 5 year old neice can draw something, what you do is nothing special.

Is the advance of web-technology making web design more difficult? Are these people only able to produce graphics, because they’re scared to even take a bash at producing a web-compatible layout because of ever increasing standards? Do they suck at their jobs? Yes, they do. You guys have no balls and are very similar to these foreigners who come over and do half assed attempts at web work. Web designers? No way. You are failed artists.

Your job, ‘web designers’ is to take an idea or concept and design it for the web. See how that works? “web” – for the World Wide Web and “designer” – to design. You following me so far, fuckers? Designing a graphic simply does not qualify by definition. It’s inaccessible to the web. It does nothing. It doesn’t work. You have failed at your task and you should not be paid. If you paid for a plumber to come over and fix your hot water, and he managed to make your cold water even colder, you wouldn’t expect to pay him would you? That’s not the job you wanted.

I have only one thing left to say to you people. Learn how to fucking use HTML. Lazy fat fucks.

Technorati Tags: web design, web designers, design, web developer, web development, HTML, XHTML, lazy