Stephen Hay on the classic designers should learn to code maxim. He sets it up nicely:
One thing you notice when hanging hundreds of paintings and drawing by kids, especially the younger ones, is that many tend to draw symbols of what they see. The don’t draw the sun, they draw a circle with lines around it.
Then, maybe, you learn to draw:
Learning to look carefully at what’s really there. What’s really happening. Circles on a wine glass become ellipses. The hard lines of the sun become gradations of color. […] For those inexperienced with drawing, it will be one of the best drawings you’ve ever made up to that point.
And so too with websites:
… it wasn’t the coding that was important. It was the movement away from symbolic representations of that which we were designing. It was about not using flat images as a poor proxy for something that’s different
