CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

I wasn’t at An Event Apart: Chicago 2009. But along with other desk jockeys, I followed along via A Feed Apart. One comment that got re-tweeted about seventy million times during the conference was the following quote by one Jeffrey Zeldman:

“Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.”

When I made a comment about the amount of retweets occurring on this post, I got a reply from Molly Holzschlag (who I respect, but am incapable of pronouncing the last name of):

“Bless my pals at AEA but the entire comment is bait or a very misguided statement to make on the brink of 2010.”

When two people who helped define the industry as it is today have a difference of opinion, I’m left on the sidelines wondering which to agree with. One the one hand, I agree with the concept that design needs to occur more in the browser and less in Photoshop, but on the flip side I suspect Molly has some insights that I’m simply not taking into account.

So I’ll throw it to the web at large. What’s your opinion on this topic? Do designers need to start doing more design in (X)HTML and CSS, or are we coders going too far in expecting the to put Photoshop aside in the early design phase?

It’s trendy to brand a site redesign as 2.0 (or 3.0, 4.0, etc.), so much so that I don’t think I want to go down that path. But as of Monday, October 20, 2008, CSSquirrel is operating under a new redesign.

A major annoyance I had with the previous incarnation of the site was that it looked entirely too much like a Wordpress-powered blog.

And yes, it is one. But it’s more than that. It’s become a sort of rallying point for my identity on the massive nest of tubes called the Internet, and I needed it to reflect more than a weekly blog entry about obscure CSS styles. As I’ve been absorbed into more and more social pieces of Web 2.0 (see, even the web can’t avoid that numbering system), I found myself having more and more of a challenge of directing people to various bits of me on the Internet.

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