I agree with your latter statement - I've worked with a few teams now, and the best output always comes from teams that have designers with good foundation knowledge (i.e., of the psychology of design, alignment, balance, colour, gestalt, typography, white space etc - they could be highly effective print designers as well), who work closely with developers with deep understanding of the medium, where both sides are reluctant to compromise, but understand where they need to.

For the former though, I actually wish more designers had better knowledge of the "shallow and antiquated schools of thought" from the print world. A lot of that was born out of decades of iteration, and many of the toys that the web gives us aren't actually very useful for the kinds of content that many of them are tasked with publishing.

While I agree with you, from my experience, it seems like something that is more often normal to have knowledge of for older designers but seems like more of a passion for young designers to fully grasp as they may have to go out of their way to acquire such skills. I've found great people to work with of all ages but if they don't have coding skills and understand the evolution of graphics into interfaces or web assets than it becomes more and more difficult to continue working together on tight projects.

Unfortunately I rarely come across designers like this. It seems many designers prefer to be more like “concept artists for apps or interfaces” and leave gritty implementation details for the developer to figure out, rather than be actual designers who can think within development constraints, and consider all edge cases and state changes over time.

> Unfortunately I rarely come across designers like this.

Perhaps that's because "designer" is just a label that anybody can use, as opposed to e.g. an "MSc industrial design" which is someone with proper education.