When I started making websites, “a designer who codes” wasn’t a big deal. After all, the only place to procure the obscure people who made websites was Craigslist. Finding “a designer who codes” seemed like the least odd thing you’d find.
The web was so new you’d always have the strangest concoction of disciplines amongst those who worked on it — an english major doing product, an actor writing API code, or a poet who moving pixels. I encountered all these and it wasn’t strange, it was _cool_
@jimniels Feels like there has been steady and effective marketing to downplay the generalist, or the designer who codes and the coder who designs, from both ends of the specialist roles for developers and designers: "If you're doing both you certainly can't be maximizing either."
But the hand-off gap between the two also seems to have grown in consequence of this. Which is maybe why there's murmuring of it all coming full circle soon.
@walpolea “if you’re doing both, you’re not maximizing either” precisely.
but everything’s a tradeoff. specialization is, by definition, exclusionary. to your point, I think we’re beginning to see what we’ve traded for it (e.g. the real cost of interdisciplinary communication and “hand-off” is very high)
