There’s a gap between designing for the web and understanding how it works. I spent years as an architect drawing buildings I understood inside and out — structure, materials, how gravity and light interact with form. When I moved into web design, I realised I was designing surfaces without understanding the substrate.

That’s not a criticism. Visual builders like Bricks and Webflow have made it possible to produce genuinely good work without writing code. But there’s a difference between using a tool and understanding what it’s doing under the hood.

I’m not suggesting every designer needs to learn JavaScript. But knowing how CSS specificity works, why layout shifts happen, or what a server actually does when someone visits your site — that knowledge changes how you design. It makes you faster, more confident, and harder to mislead by developers who say “that can’t be done.”

The best architects I worked with understood engineering. The best web designers I know understand the web.