Left Brain, Right Brain
I’ve explained this in recent years to quite a number of potential customers and so thought I’d blog about it.
Web developers tend to be involved in the ‘coding’ and building of a website rather than being ‘creative designers’ who can create something aesthetically pleasing and creative to actually look at from a web visitors visual perspective. A creative designer tends to design the look and feel of what is called the ‘front end’ of the website - ie what the website actually looks like.
Now can one person do both tasks to a high standard? Personally I don’t think they can in my experience though I’d love to meet the exception one day.
Now one person may be able to carry out both tasks … the design, and the web development (coding and building of the site and it’s functions), however it’s unknown that a person is capable of being both a talented creative designer and a skilled coder at the same time, this is because they are opposing natural skillsets.
What I mean is that it’s all to do with the left side and the right side of the brain. Creative people use the left and people who ‘code’ websites use the right side.
Left brain people tend to be: Logical, rational, and analytical and as such tend to be naturally skilled at such tasks such as web development which requires a person to develop a knowledge of coding languages such as .html, .php, .mysql, .java and more.
Right brain people tend to be: More random, intuitive, subjective and as a result creative, this makes them ideally suited (naturally) to the creativity required to design the look, feel, layout and graphics that make up a front end web design.
A left brain person finds it very difficult to be creative and yet are great at web development tasks and coding languages due to their analytical and logical nature, and a right brained person is creative enough to produce original graphics and yet will struggle with the natural skills required to work with complex coding languages.
It’s actually practically impossible for one person to be highly skilled at both due to the way in which the brain works - one either leans towards being right brained, or one tends to lean towards being left brained. Not one person I’ve ever met is exactly left and right brained and therefore highly skilled at both areas of web design.
A creative designer can probably just about code a simple website to a half decent standard, but will never excel at coding of anything overly difficult such as the back-end of complex e-commerce websites or databases, and a web developer can probably hash together a half decent ‘looking’ website that won’t be too offensive on the eyes, but it will never be strikingly beautiful, original or ground breaking in terms of creative design.
Which side of the brain do you use the most?
When I see this dancer, she’s totally clockwise to me and I can’t force myself to see her any other way no matter how hard I try. I a right brainer, which figures.
November 6th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I’m a pure lefty, so I’m doomed to never understanding numbers or equations or any of that boring stuff. But I play a mean guitar
Handedness is no doubt an identifier of which side of the brain is dominant. I am most jealous of people who are ambidextrous, they are probably be closest to being balanced…
November 6th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Should have mentioned that ‘handedness’ is the opposite way to how the brain is wired. Meaning I’m ‘right’ brained!
November 6th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
You know, I keep doing that, getting it the wrong way round thinking that ‘left’ is the creative side. I think it’s because we all equate ‘leftness’ to more liberal/relaxed type of people and we then relate that to being the creative side of the brain.
I am hideous with numbers, I was a complete idiot at maths in school. No sooner had I been taught something, literally 5 minutes later I’d forgotten how to do it - the teacher used to get really angry with me like I was doing it on purpose once!
And here’s a funny story. I took a maths test once when I was about 14yrs old and got 13%, the teacher was not impressed and made me and some other bad performer take it again … I got 6% the second time round - she was enraged and accused me of doing it on purpose!
I seriously wasn’t doing it on purpose, I did actually ‘try’ to get the answers right - my mind just really struggles with remembering mathematical formulas. They just slip out my head really easily.
Thanks for your post!
November 8th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
This article is REALLY interesting! Especially the moving dancer, I can’t possibly see that she’s turning anti-clockwise!
Unfortunately I’m the same with numbers…I failed my GCSE maths with a D which I had to resit, in contrast I got a A* in my graphic products course!
I don’t think anyone can be good at both web designing and the coding behind it all, I’d love to have both skills but with coding I’d feel like I was doing it more for the money than the enjoyment - but I do enjoy the problem solving that comes with coding.
Interesting article.
November 9th, 2009 at 9:34 am
That moving dancer hurts my eyes trying to turn her the other way - some people say that can do it, but I really can’t.
I find coding really frustrating personally. I don’t enjoy it when problem solving comes up (which it always does with coding), I just find it really irritating. The day I decided to not code for clients any more was a great day at Truly Ace, ha ha.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Right brain! The dancer is always going clockwise but I focus really hard I can make it go anti-clockwise… guess thats what im doing when coding! Designing comes naturally but coding I have to think a lot! I have learnt a lot of coding over the years and I am very comfortable with CSS/XHTML but when it comes to adding more into my brain such as PHP and jQuery I just seem to flush it straight back out! Its not all bad though, design is a harder thing to learn that coding and codes can be found on helpful websites! So im happy with mine
November 10th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
That’s about the extent of my ‘coding’ - .html is ok, css is very shaky and everything else makes my brain bleed when I try to understand it
I think whether design is harder to learn or not than coding depends on your brain. Some coders are always saying … “Oh it’s easy to do that” - well it’s easy ‘to them’ due to the way their brain works, but completely beyond me most the time.
November 13th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Hi, nice article. I do see the lady spinning both ways. easy. I am a developer and not a graphic designer. I am not a graphic designer because I have never spent any time on learning any graphic design tools. We do have people in the team who can use graphic design tools but I don’t necessarily think they are more creative than me. I can draw, I am pretty good. I spent my entire childhood with pens and paper (we were poor) and used to design wall paper, clothes, cards, draw people. the first time I used a computer was day 1 of my computing degree 11 or so years ago!! I do like my code neat and tidy though and spend too much time removing white space and line breaks from it
December 1st, 2009 at 11:28 pm
I’m strongly right-brained - I cannot get the dancer to reverse at all. In fact I cannot even ’see’ how that could happen. I’ve given up on trying to build even the most basic website for myself as the endless frustration was making me almost ill. The phrase ‘why on earth does it have to be this difficult’ kept being uttered, along with noises of things breaking.
Photographer, Writer, History and Philosophy teacher - says it all really. Also right handed and left-eyed (photographers know these things).
I’ve known this problem from other contexts - in the printing trade, good printers are lousy designers - usually.
It’s time that we forced the right brained idiots who design things like web programs to do their job properly and design systems that - a) work in simple language, and b) forgive obvious and simple mistakes. What’s so hard about having a program with the instruction ‘if it doesn’t work with a comma, try it with a point’ ? I’m used to robust programs like Photoshop - web building programs are unbelievably fragile.