A bit of back-story for you: It’s exam time for me, so I’ve been spending a lot of my time revising certain subjects. One thing I love to do to unwind after hitting the books is watch Scrubs. Scrubs is a show we can all appreciate, especially when a lot of it most like happens in real hospitals. Believe it or not, people do some crazy things, then go to the hospital and pretend they ‘fell on it’ or something else strange.

Two scenes from two episodes I watched today really made me think. The main one (from Season 6) was about Turk breaking his hand and being forced to work as a medical resident, where as a surgeon he was hopeless. To disprove Dr. Cox Turk crammed as much medical knowledge as he could and was able to answer a question almost correctly. Whilst he didn’t get the question right the fact that he tried put him far ahead of the rest of his group of surgical attendings.

Much like Scrubs there are two types of people associated with Websites, and that’s Designers and Developers. Believe it or not a lot of clients put their trust into one of the two for their entire websites. Whilst this can be a cost-effective solution involving in a very good layout and back-end there are times when a developer will create a shoddy design or a designer will overlook security and optimisation. I’ve worked with a few websites where a developer is also the designer, and it’ll either be a success or a train-wreck.

What’s worse is when you’re dealing with both a designer and a developer. There needs to be a good, friendly understanding between the two otherwise you’ll delay your project and potentially end up with a botched website.

So why can’t designers and developers get along perfectly fine?

It’s because they’re two completely different animals. You’ve all seen it plenty of times in movies, the geeky, physics-strong brainiac meets the cool, physically-strong idiot. I’m not trying to paint any stereotypes, because designers and developers can be picture-perfect equals apart from their professions.

What many do not realise is that by removing yourself from the other side you’ll never become fully aware of the boundaries of your own. As a developer I got involved with graphic design and eventually was able to command control of complicated programs. As a result it made me see how far I could go with my development of web page and eventually it started to pay off. My scripts were no longer so static and their implementation became much better as a result.

I implore anyone here who works as a designer to step into a developers shoes for a couple of hours a month. Try some coding, read some coding blogs and go see what all the fuss is about, and developers should go and check out some fantastic resources like deviantART and CSS Zen Garden to get some inspiration. You owe it to yourself to experience everything you can in your field, so dabble in everything and learn from it.