I’ve been to several design conferences in the past couple years, and typically within the first few hours some sort of discussion will break out – usually on Twitter – over “should designers code”.

A lot of pixels and a some vitriol have been also spilled on the subject. But it’s really nothing but a bunfight. Opinions get tossed around but no one actually gets hurt.

My position has always been of course designers should code. Why would you not? It’s the fundamental technology of the web.

But “designers should code” sounds a little bossypants. I’m not sure I like that.

After all, it’s not a necessity to do the job. Whatever genius drew the bite-the-back-of-your-hand beautiful lines of an Aston Martin probably doesn’t know how to design a fuel injection system.

Coding and building have always been a natural fit for me. I’ve been studying both computers and design since I was teen. In high school I programmed an Apple II to to draw an endless array of swirling colored lines. It felt like magic then and years later coding a website still feels a little like magic.

But a lot of designers didn’t follow my path into the industry. They were painting and drawing and studying graphic design while I was pecking away at a keyboard.

Their art-before-science approach has value. So I’d like to make a more nuanced case for designers learning to code.

Web “design” is all in how you define it, like the tale of the elephant and the blind men. The argument is whether a designer should understand the parts or the whole.

A visitor to this or any other site sees the images and color and typography choices, aesthetics – designer stuff, the parts. But they’re seeing the whole thing. They’re seeing your data structure, your site architecture.

They’re seeing the HTML/CSS/jQuery – the equivalent to a building’s structural steel. They’re seeing that your site is lightweight and fast when it loads seemingly instantly. They’re seeing that the code and the structural parts have real beauty in how they support the overall need.

There’s joy in how the most mundane parts of a thing are made. When Jonny Ive talks about the design of a unibody Macbook he’s as enthusiastic over the process and the functionality itself as much as beauty of the final object.

That’s how designers should think about their work.

Greatness comes from the entire object. And the only way to understand a thing is to make it, to get your hand hands in the dirt.

This is design. And it’s in the code as much as the final product.