Lately, I’ve noticed many people consider themselves the either or and not both. I consider myself more of a developer since I have more experience in programming and developing applications. While browsing the Internet for the past several days, I’ve taken notice on the designs and functions of each website that has to do with web design or web development and there is an absolute line that distance the two types apart.
Let’s take 2 counterparts for example, Smashing Magazine and Sitepoint. 2 of these websites are highly known in their specific web industry genres (design and development) and I consider them counterparts. While Smashing Magazine is a designer’s resource site, Sitepoint is targeted towards developers.
In comparison, the Smashing Magazine has won the in the visual appeal category. While their website is full of eye-candy and graphics, Sitepoint has next to no graphics (if you don’t count advertiser’s graphics). Turn the tables around, you have Sitepoint with more advanced functions such as their tag cloud found at the footer, ecommerce store, marketplace, and much more. Although some may disagree with me on this, but as a developer, I can see that Smashing uses it’s CMS or blogging platform to handle most of its sections.
Although some designers and developers are making the jump from one side of the fence to the other, the work they produce still shows which side is still stronger (especially when you are right on the top of the fence and afraid to jump down to the other side). As for me, I’m still crunching while loops and if-then-else statements. I can tell you one thing though, it is quite hard to jump into design when you are suffering from deuteranopia.
