The Designer Who Codes

I recently read an article by Garry Tan, which can be found here. Titled The Value of the Designer Who Codes, it explains how designers who are also engineers can be very successful.

I completely agree with the article, which provides multiple examples of how this is true. One such example was a conversation between late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve jobs and Apple engineer Chris Espinosa in the early stages of the company’s Mac OS. Jobs was dissatisfied with the way the first calculator application looked, and finally Espinosa put together a program that allowed Jobs to design the calculator himself. After designing it to his perfection, this version of the calculator was used for fifteen years as a part of the Mac OS. The article goes on to say how powerful that anecdote would be if it were about one person instead of two. “What if the design vision of Steve Jobs could be in the same brain as the engineering excellence of Chris Espinosa?” the article asks.

According to the author, “the designer who codes” is most valued within effective software teams in the Silicon Valley. This person builds what he or she knows what people need, but builds it in a way that it is aesthetically pleasing and goes hand in hand with its function. Here, the article gives the example of Silicon Valley start-up Quora. On lead designer Rebekah Cox’s team, everyone else is also an engineer. What I found most interesting is that the designing doesn’t happen in a different program like Photoshop. It happens within the code.

According to Cox, "Knowing the technology better means more productive arguments when there are disagreements because everyone speaks the same language." In my opinion, this is absolutely true. When the basics of the design are sorted out, it doesn’t really matter which language is used to code it, because everyone else knows it anyway.

Facebook also runs its design team in this way. Click here to read the article I wrote on Facebook trending down.

The article concludes by saying the combination of design and engineering results in magical experiences for the user.