The Tension Between Designers and Programmers

There is a long-standing tension between designers and programmers, not unlike the relationship between architects and builders. Programmers, it has been said, are concerned with making things work, designers with making them workable. Put another way, programmers labor in the realm between pure science and applied technology, designers between technology and its meaning to people. From the view of traditional programmers, designers are decorative artists with little grasp of what it takes to build a website or application and make it work. To the designers, programmers are technicians so lost in the parts and pieces they are blind to the expressive power of the fully integrated whole. Each side introduces trouble for the other.

Away from work, most programmers are as moved by the sensuous and aesthetic dimensions of a website or application as anyone else. At work, however, the overwhelmingly analytical, coolly objective nature of their approach tends to splinter apart and suppress this response. The website or application becomes a conglomeration of discrete elements whose build, and performance are the programmers heavy burden. Without intent the designer favors form above function.

Ratio is a partnership of design and programming to its fullest extent. We make what works beautiful and what's beautiful work.

(A summation from The Creative Priority, by Jerry Hirshberg, pages 69-70)