As a "web designer", HTML/CSS are your medium. If you don't understand your medium, you don't understand your craft. Last I checked, web browsers don't understand PSD files, which means without HTML/CSS the design isn't finished.
Imagine hiring a painter to do oil on canvas and they handed you a picture of a painting, or a sketch of what the finished painting should look like. You hired them for oil on canvas - not something that looks like oil on canvas.
When hiring a designer for a web project, I expect to receive html files that can be opened in a browser. In the very few cases where the designer didn't know HTML/CSS, I hired a designer who did to finish the job - because the inherent decisions with modeling a website in HTML/CSS are design-minded decisions.
As such, I suppose as a designer you don't HAVE to know HTML/CSS, but then I can't think of a single reason to hire you for a web project. Print, maybe - provided they understand the needs and limitations of printing and can provide files in a format the printer can use. Otherwise, I'm just going to have to hire a more talented designer to finish the job, which will leave me to wonder - why did I ever hire that first designer?
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As a "web designer", HTML/CSS are your medium. If you don't understand your medium, you don't understand your craft. Last I checked, web browsers don't understand PSD files, which means without HTML/CSS the design isn't finished.
Imagine hiring a painter to do oil on canvas and they handed you a picture of a painting, or a sketch of what the finished painting should look like. You hired them for oil on canvas - not something that looks like oil on canvas.
When hiring a designer for a web project, I expect to receive html files that can be opened in a browser. In the very few cases where the designer didn't know HTML/CSS, I hired a designer who did to finish the job - because the inherent decisions with modeling a website in HTML/CSS are design-minded decisions.
As such, I suppose as a designer you don't HAVE to know HTML/CSS, but then I can't think of a single reason to hire you for a web project. Print, maybe - provided they understand the needs and limitations of printing and can provide files in a format the printer can use. Otherwise, I'm just going to have to hire a more talented designer to finish the job, which will leave me to wonder - why did I ever hire that first designer?