Shockingly, Web Designers should know how to design for the web, not just for Photoshop.  Its a point that was driven home during my recent trip to California for Forum One\'s (my employer) Online Community Summit. While I may not have done a comprehensive survey, I visited another web company there, and also met a number of folks who work in Silicon Valley.  The former shared that their internal IA/Interface team were proficient in CSS/Javascript/HTML and used their skills to produce HTML prototypes, not sites idealized in Photoshop.  Similary, another person who described there job as a \"designer\" involved the complete lifecyle from paper prototyping, html prototyping, to final development.

A post on 37 signals, where someone asked \"Do I need a designer to make pretty?\" [pretty much confirms this notion.  I\'m hopeful that we\'re finallly seeing a transition away from \"Designers\" as the folks to got into the web from a print/media background to a new generation who got their design feet wet online, and are comfortable with the technologies therein. \ ]{.author}

Thinking of designers as someone who paints the application pretty in Photoshop is a common but unfortunate misconception. We certainly don't have any designers like that. Instead, our designers apply their talents to the native materials of the web by working directly with [HTML]{.caps}, CSS, and occasionally Ruby code or JavaScript.

\ That said, having good visual design skills is pretty hard.  There\'s a whole set of right-brain skills that can be harder to excercise, hone, as you can clearly see on my sites.\

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