“Design roles will require some coding knowledge”

Mikolaj Dobrucki has been blending design with design engineering for a decade and has extensive experience as a content creator.

He believes that the future of design is inherently tied to coding. He shares, “It would be more common that UX design roles will require some coding knowledge".

His insights are featured in his writings and talks, including collaborations with Penpot on topics like Flex Layout and Grid Layout, published in Smashing Magazine.

We invited him to our latest Penpot Open Chat. We were curious to know his opinion about questions such as: What do you have in mind when you say “designers”? He explained, “The persona is still a designer but ready for the change.” This shift reflects the growing overlap between design and code, as more UX roles are expected to incorporate coding skills.

:point_right: Watch the whole interview on YouTube and Peertube, or tune in via Ivoox and Spotify.

The gap between designers and developers

While discussing user personas, Pablo pointed out Penpot’s focus on both areas: “We want to bridge the gap between designers and developers”. Penpot is creating a tool that links the two fields, making collaboration between designers and developers smoother and more effective. “We hope Penpot in 1-2 years will help accelerate the overlapping idea”.

Agnostic tools around design

They also talked about advocating for tool-agnostic skills around design. For Mikolaj, when learning one, you can manage to learn others and not get obsessed with features. He said, “Powerful tools make designing easier so this gives us room and time to learn some more complex things like Flex or Grid”.

Declarative design

What about declarative design? Mikolaj said, “I cannot think of any declarative design tool superior to CSS right now”. CSS and SVG were discussed in terms of their challenges and opportunities. Mikolaj mentioned that while CSS is powerful, it often feels slow and restrictive during the initial design stages. Pablo recognized the advantages of SVG, but also its drawbacks, noting, “SVG has its own limitations… it’s not necessarily the language in which you express a UI.”

Stay tuned as we keep exploring how the boundaries between design and coding are evolving in our next Open Chats!

:point_right: Enjoyed this interview? Catch up on all the Penpot Open Chat episodes through our YouTube playlist.
:point_right: More about Mikolaj

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I really wish for more of this in the future! The talk was very enjoyable and it’s always good to learn more about the philosophy and perspective of open source software teams.

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Hey @tudorcelstan, thanks for sharing you enjoyed it! Keep an eye out because there’s more to come.

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This perspective is certainly a strong one if we consider the dependency designers often have when it comes to handoffs or developing basic user interfaces, systems, and so on. The concept of “autonomy” seems closely tied to this perspective. I don’t entirely agree though.

Beyond the research results Pablo mentioned in the video (and perhaps some of my questions were touched upon there), I’d like to emphasize other concerns that may not have been fully addressed:

  1. Access and Inclusion: How does Penpot ensure accessibility for designers who may lack coding knowledge or resources to learn it? Can coding knowledge be a requirement while still making the tool inclusive for people interested in exploring design?

  2. The Role of Designers vs. Automation: Should designers invest time learning to code while robots and AI are increasingly trained to handle these handoff challenges? Wouldn’t it be better to let AI automate or translate UI into code, leaving designers to focus on creative, conceptual, and testing work?

I’m not suggesting that learning “some coding” isn’t valuable—I personally embraced this perspective some time ago (a special waste of time, once I am much better on product strategies, research and/or UI). But I’m not entirely convinced this is the path we should follow with an open-source, inclusive tool like Penpot.

It was a relief to hear what Pablo brought and, to go further with the conversation… I must say that ~ on deppest dreams ~ that Penpot could instead stand out by being more pedagogical and playful, creating an environment that doesn’t require coding knowledge — specially from new users, whether they are designers or not. This would be an incredible approach to a Open Source / Free Software which encourages exploration and learning without placing barriers for entry.

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Hi @godoicami!

Thanks for sharing your concerns.

About how Penpot could be more pedagogical and playful, that is precisely one of our main focuses. We are working on making it easy for anyone to learn design and use Penpot in the smoothest possible way.

We’ve not only created the Learning Center and hands-on demo sessions, but we are also creating a new course that will teach design with Penpot step by step, and it will be regularly updated to support both newcomers to Penpot and those new to design. We’ll be releasing the first chapters as soon as possible to gather feedback and keep improving.

If you have any other ideas for this mission, please let us know!

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Awesome! The Learning Center is incredible!

I would keep in mind a learning center that goes from “Learn Penpot” to “Learn with Penpot” (I mean, you could make this a key-factor to be communicated to universities and other types of design schools)

That’s the idea, @godoicami! To bring it to educational institutions and make sure that not just students but specially teachers fall in love with our course & resources so they can use them and include them in their curriculum.

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