I did graphic and motion design for 20+ years and been doing full stack dev for the last 6. It's very difficult to do both and excel at - especially in the frontend space where things move incredibly fast. As you try to excel at one, you'll feel left behind in the other. Very stressful.

> All designers should be able to code and do html/css. It's the medium of design.

So a fashion designer can mass produce clothing? So an interior designer can build a house?

This designer should has never held.

Fashion designers can, in general, work with fabric, yes. And an interior designer should probably have some idea of how to paint at the very least. To me with web design so much of what matters is encoded in the CSS and HTML that it is the final design product. Anything produced before is a sketch, a concept, but it's not a design.

The analogies you have offered aren't great.

For example designers and developers both use the computer as their primary medium of working. Their outputs resemble each other very closely, despite having a different underlying form.

Contrast that to the interior designer building a house, well those are different mediums. There is no efficiency gain from the interior designer designing the plan and also implementing it. Where as with a designer working in code there is one.

Fashion designers do indeed make clothing by hand, it's a very important part of their craft. This example disproves your stance.

> Fashion designers do indeed make clothing by hand, it's a very important part of their craft.

That’s not what I said. There’s the problem. I said mass produce.

HTML and CSS, sure, but modern frontend design is way more than that; it's a jungle out there.

Ever seen a vibe-coded react app? It's astounding how well SOTA LLMs can produce good looking code in detail, but zoom out to the architectural or broader picture and it becomes an unholy mess.

It's like a masterpiece painted by an artist with their nose 5 inches from the canvas at all times.