ASP.NET Does Not Exist For Web Designers

I've been exploring the world of the web designer and noticed that ASP.NET does not exist in that world. I've been reading web design blogs and browsing through articles on http://www.designfloat.com/, a sort of DIGG site for the design community, and I don't encounter any mention of ASP.NET at all.

I have observed that web designers are somewhat aware of PHP because they are heavily involved in developing custom themes for WordPress. Creating skins and themes for open source web applications seems to be a good gig for web designers. But a lot of the attention is on WordPress, Joomla, and OsCommerce. I don't find any articles, guides, or other resources on designing for DotNetNuke or ASP.NET Master Pages, etc. Of course, I could find that through a targeted search but I'm trying to get a overall sense of what the design community is focused on.

Web designers are urged to increase their "coding skills" but this usually means CSS and XHTML.  They are not pressured to learn PHP and they certainly aren't being asked to know anything at all about C# or VB.NET or even ASP.NET.

It is not clear why web designers are so ignorant of ASP.NET. The complete absence of any mention of ASP.NET means there is also an absence of criticism. It could be that ASP.NET was dismissed by the design community because it fails to generate HTML code that meets the design community's standards, i.e. layout through CSS rather than tables, cross browser support, etc. Of course, you can solve some of these problems with the CSS Friendly Control Adapters but that is too technical for a web designer. I suspect ASP.NET is too technical in general for web designers. They are very adverse to code and programming.

On the other hand, the ASP.NET community is surprisingly focused on esoteric programming and software engineering topics. I wonder if this explains why ASP.NET initially had such poor support for proper CSS layout and browser compatibility? The engineer mindset seems to govern its development rather than a pure web developer's perspective.

Since I am not an ASP.NET evangelist it does not trouble me that web designers aren't interested in ASP.NET. From my perspective this just means there may be an opportunity here to bridge the gap. I have had easy projects that merely involved applying a design to an ASP.NET web site because the designer couldn't do it without messing things up. Web designers do have a lot of trouble working with ASP.NET. They don't understand a page directive and they delete web controls that are referenced in the code behind, causing the familiar "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error which baffles them. I'm considering a transition from programming to web design and I suspect I would find the least competition in developing DotNetNuke skins.

The web design community is not preparing for Silverlight. I did not come across any mention of Silverlight or Expression Blend while idly browsing web design articles and topics. Of course, if you are totally uninterested in ASP.NET then you are not going to be following the developments in Silverlight. This may create a brief opportunity in a tight market for Expresion Blend designers. I'm not a technology or business pundit so I'm not going to speculate on the fortunes of Microsoft's technology bids. I'm actually studying Flash right now, not Silverlight, because Flash has become very important for online video and Flash is used for a lot of animation which is a type of content I could create.

I plan to continue to infiltrate the web design community and gauge their interest in ASP.NET and Silverlight. It may be advantageous for me to collaborate with a professional web designer and get some feedback on my efforts to apply design to ASP.NET web sites.

9 Comments

  • Well my designers use photoshop to give me the look they want, and then they give me some seriously overcomplicated markup in HTML. As the coder and the person that will be feeding the page with ever changing data, I feel it is my job to clean the HTML and make it so I can make it use dynamic content (ie can it handle longer text, can it grow wider if neeeded,). I don't think those tasks should be left to the designers who simply have a good eye for page layout. If some day you find an individual that is adept at both, make sure you are treating them well!

  • So who designed my companies 80+ websites if the designers didn't do it? They're asp.net sites. :)

    I just think that maybe you aren't looking in the right communities.

  • Why should the designers care about the platform that the developers will be using to implement their design?

    I have worked with many excellent designers over the years and asking them to understand a development platform never works. They care about look & feel, which is all they should care about. How the developer implements their look & feel doesn't (and shouldn't) really matter to them.

    Over the years I have found that the best way to work with designers is to ask them to do the following:

    1) Produce the mocked design in Photoshop & a style guide that includes colors, font sizes, margin, padding, etc.

    2) Take their mockup and make some notes on implementation.

    3) Go back to them and negotiate on a few things that will make implementation easier without ruining their design.

    4) Get the design assets & then implement the CSS & look & feel.

    5) Get back togeter and make sure that you captured their design.

    Anyways, that has worked for me quite well.

    -Aaron

  • I agree with Dave. In my company we have a team directly working on just html designs. They give no favor to what technology drives the html, just what it looks like. They provide us with what it should look like, it our developers jobs to apply that look to our pages. It is even that way in the small company that I work for part-time.

  • Have you ever looked at the code generated by Asp.Net...

    Maybe Asp.Net Mvc could change this fact, but for the moment, Asp.Net is not very "Web Designer" friendly !

    I'm a developer, when I was using Asp classis, the web designers in my company where my friends (the ones that deals with HTML, not those using exclusively Photoshop), and we could do work together on the basis of Html templates.

    Since we're using Asp.net, things have changed... One and only one form in a page, a lot of tables generated everywhere, a lot of containers added, a huge viewstate, no control on the name of the objects (ok, we can trouble shoot all these, but it finally takes more time to do so than doing all from scratch)...

    We develop fast but are not often very proud of the results...

  • Do "Web Designers", the kinds that work at big companies, actually exist still?

    I know there are free lance onces out there, or small companies that just "create a website", however... if you're a development shop, if you employ a "web designer" that has no idea on how you actually make your webpages, what are they doing with their time?

    Someone that just creates mockups all day probably isn't very excited to come to work all the time.

    Microsoft Expressions is great for helping the designers I've worked with. Sure use photoshop, or whatever you want to create the markup, then add to that persons job description to create a sample page showing every control and how they look like:

    -h1-h6
    -tables
    -UL's / Ol's
    -FieldSets
    -etc.

    That way when the developers get their hands on it, they have a full model on how the site should look, and not have to re-write markup / script.

  • I think the lack of collaboration between designers and developers prevents a lot of innovation. For example, if the web designer does not understand ASP.NET 2.0 themes and skins and the web application developer does not take an interest in the site design then you are unlikely to find the site offering the visitor the ability to change the web site's theme even though this is easy enough to implement.

    There are some things that could be done which absolutely require a marriage of design and programming, such as dynamic manipulation of vector graphics defined through XML, i.e SVG, for animation. I suspect SVG is dead because there wasn't enough collaboration between designers and developers.

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