Originally Posted by brandonstills

Depends on what you mean. Generally design should be separate from code. This is a basic principle of MVC that has been established as a best practice for more than a decade.

However, just because someone doesn't use a template doesn't mean they aren't separating their design from their code. There are many more ways than templates to accomplish this.

In fact, I rarely use templates because I find them very inefficient (from a development standpoint), the only exception is when I need to expose template type functionality to an end user where they will be coming up with a different design on a daily basis (like email newsletters or something).

The books "The Pragmatic Programmer" or "Code Generation" have some good ideas of other ways to go about things. I highly recommend them.