At the risk of opening a can of worms, I think the reason I find coding a good skill for designers is that it forces us to describe our designs and the logic therein in a strict syntax. By extension, you can develop the same skills just by describing your designs _in writing_.
Case in point: I've been thinking about layouts this week, and realising that Sketch is a poor design tool to express responsive layouts, and simply writing about the ideas (along with some psuedocode demonstrations) is taking me further than a design tool might have.
My experience being that if you can’t explain an idea or a design in simple terms:
• You probably don’t understand it fully yourself
• You’re forcing someone else to do that work (an engineer, or worse, customers)
• You probably don’t understand it fully yourself
• You’re forcing someone else to do that work (an engineer, or worse, customers)
Code forces us to reason about the idea in one way or another. Empathy and generalist skills aside, this is a really compelling reason to learn even rudimentary HTML.
