Web Designer vs Web Developer

One of panels I went to at SXSW last week was one exploring the relationship between the web designer and the web developer. Dan live-blogged the panel, which included such gems as:

I’m going to focus on mr Matt. Jones. Who some of you may know. He’s got this long experience at the BBC and he’s spent time at Nokia, the kind of company where you can make big products that change the world but the lead time can be really long, at Dopplr we keep things moving and ship things several times a day. He refers to me as his technical wife - I’m proud to be his technical wife - he’s my design husband. [laughter] I think when a technical wife and a design husband love each other very much they have a special meeting and nine months later a website is born. [more laughter]

At some point during the panel they mentioned dueling banjos; I’m not sure if it is co-incidence or not but my mail contained this video that is hoping to go viral, from Microsoft. It’s all about how they hope Expression Studio can reduce conflict between designers and developers when making sites, linking through to web-harmony.co.uk (a site that fails in Firefox on a Mac, so they’re not that harmonious!). Interestingly, one of the freebies in the swag at SXSW was a copy of the software, so as a marketing campaign they are trying many routes to connect with their audience.