In the past, I’ve gotten into discussions with people over what makes someone a web designer. In one case, the other person did Photoshop mock-ups and didn’t even know HTML – he used WYSIWYG editors to code sites for him. In another case, the person knows CSS really well and we were talking about how that’s something I need to get a lot better at (which is true). However, every time I’ve had discussions like this, they seem to revolve a lot around the tools you need to know in order to do the job and not about what design elements make a site that’s appealing to the eye.

This link has probably been around a lot already, but I think this site by Miranda July puts an interesting spin on the issue raised above. She doesn’t know HTML or CSS herself, but yet she’s definitely the designer of the site because the layout is in the way she framed the photos. The result is a site that’s far more creative than most, either because or in spite of the fact that she was using non-traditional web design tools.