I think a lot of this goes back to the fundamental skill set of a designer.

I once heard Mark Braddock say that when a client asks him to do something arbitrary like Add more blue he usually will ask them to describe what is wrong with the design. The problem for many people is that they don’t know how to communicate with designers. Add more blue is a solution, it’s the job of the designer to come up with that solution while It doesn’t feel bright enough is a problem, that’s what you need to communicate. I think he’s pretty spot on here.

I don’t think Designers need to know the Solutions for web development problems but they do need to understand how to communicate their needs, which is where having an understanding of those skills comes in handy.

I think probably I’d shorten Gary’s list to the fundamentals of web development that don’t rely on the Solutions but instead outline the field of play.

For example, I think Information Architecture, Javascript and Backend Coding could all come under one simple heading: Understand how a dynamic webpage is rendered

What you want out of that is a designer who knows that all the data in a CMS site is stored in a database, that they can use things like “date” and “title” as fields and make them repeat and all that sort of thing. A basic understanding of how a single “page” is actually made up of lots of little bits and how CSS works pretty much like Object Styles in InDesign, so they should always think in terms of those objects. And any images, movies, typefaces etc need to be accessible to everyone who views that page, again just like linking objects in InD.

Then there’s the General User Experience, Interactive Interface Design, Accessibility and Usability. I think that fits under the simple heading: Understand how changes are made to the website in real time

With that in mind you’re asking the designer to be familiar with how websites change on the fly. This includes an understanding of Triggers, so they know things happen based on Events like timers, mouse over and out, clicks, that sorta thing. Knowing that they’re still doing the same Object-Style tricks as in pre-render (obeying the same linking rules too) but it’s called up by special scripts now, so we can cause some changes in movement. A box that appears to scroll up is just having it’s height value changed every couple of miliseconds but, apart from that, it’s the same as a pre-rendered box.

Finally there’s your Mobile Interface Design and the other side of General User Experience and Usability. In a way their outcomes of knowing the above two processes. If you understand how a website is displayed and how it changes then you know what you’re able to do which is the empowering that i think most designers need. With that they’re usually very capable of dealing with user feedback and pre-evaluating the user experience a lot more.

I guess I agree with Gary in intent but I don’t think it’s so much about the skills a designer picks up as opposed to spending time learning about the Process by which their work is going to be displayed. Much like they don’t need to know how a particular type of paper is made but only what it looks like, feels like and how it responds to various colours.

A more focused approach perhaps