

No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web - jamieforrest
http://jamieforrest.com/2012/02/19/no-graphic-designers-arent-ruining-the-web/

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jaysonelliot
Designers aren't ruining the web because they want it to look good, they're
ruining the web because they aren't clear on how to do it.

As the author points out, it's not an issue of bandwidth so much as an issue
of visual clutter and processor power—although watching a page try to make
calls to a dozen separate web services before it will finish loading and let
me interact with it smoothly is certainly frustrating. That's not necessarily
the designer's fault, though, everyone shares the blame there.

No, the problem is that graphic designers generally approach web pages as if
they were designing for print or television.

After many years working in large agencies in New York, I can count on one
hand the number of "creatives" who knew any more about the technologies that
make up the web than a little basic HTML 1.0, at best.

I started my career as a print designer in the 1990s. Designing for books and
magazines, you had to understand your medium. Any print designer worth their
salt regularly went on press checks, knew the difference between a sheet-fed
litho and a web-fed offset press, how linescreens related to dpi measurements,
how trapping worked, drum vs. flatbed scanning, all that.

Compare that to graphic designers for the web, who in my experience have
little to no understanding of how a browser renders code, or how different
services communicate.

The best graphic designers aren't trying to be programmers, but they know the
medium they're working in, and they don't try to force it to be something it's
not.

Beauty, usability, and performance aren't mutually exclusive concepts on the
web. It's just that most clients only care about the first one (until the site
has already launched), and most designers don't have enough knowledge of the
second two.

~~~
jdthomas
Completely agree, just to add a few of my points...

Designers are also ruining the web because they are removing _choice_ in how I
view content.

HTML pages used to be designed such that they were a standard _markup_
language. Thus I could change the settings of my browser if I preferred a dark
background with light text. Now in the land of everything is a DIV and CSS is
used to recreate the markup language, this is no longer possible -- at least
not in a generic way. Not to mention it breaks browsing in a completely cross
platform way (lynx, small screened devices, screen readers, etc.); you
designer, will always forget at least one. And don't get me started on sites
that do not load the _content_ without javascript.

My preference would be that designers accepted the constraints of HTML. They
are more than welcome to use CSS to offer my browser _suggestions_ to how it
should be rendered, but as the viewer, the final choice would be to me. If you
_MUST_ make the layout fit some exact format, switch to PDF (or similar) and
don't pretend to be HTML.

I kind of feel like in the '90s, we screwed ourselves by having ugly defaults
in the browsers. If no-CSS HTML files rendered more beautifully, maybe we
would've avoided this mess.

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ColinWright
There's a mis-match between the terms "well-designed" and "looks beautiful." I
find many sites that look gorgeous, but I can't find what I want, and can't
make them do what I need. So I leave. They fail the basic requirement that
they meet the needs of me, a potential customer.

But I'm also finding increasingly that I feel like my face is being pushed
through mush. Everything seems soft, or rounded, or pastel, or otherwise
character-free. This button is blended, that panel is graduated. It's all free
of any kind of personality.

It's mush.

And so many times it's slow to load, slow to render, unusable on anything
other than the huge screen size used by the "designer," and I _still_ can't
find what I want.

Whose fault is that? Maybe it's not the graphic designer's fault, but it's
certainly making the web an unpleasant, unrewarding, and sometimes downright
frustrating experience.

But it looks gorgeous.

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tfb
Site appears to be down (assuming HN effect) so here's the text-only cached
version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jamiefo...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jamieforrest.com/2012/02/19/no-
graphic-designers-arent-ruining-the-web/&strip=1)

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talmand
Well, as a designer who does his best to understand his medium and make web
pages load as cleanly as possible I can only agree with some of this.

As for my role as a designer, most of the decisions that are made as to what
composes the website is not made by me. They are made by people above me in
our company's chain-of-command. Most of these people have no idea what's
involved in making a website but if I wish to continue receiving a paycheck I
do what they say. I do try to educate them in some ways so that they can
understand what's what but it doesn't always work out that way. Most of the
things on the websites I work on that I do not necessarily like I can do
nothing about, they are mostly marketing decisions.

Some of this hate towards designers can be spread around a bit more I think.

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soonisnow
Agree, it's about the how, not the who.

Methods evolve, and truly good design is as much about resource efficiency and
user experience as it is interaction dynamics and look and feel.

Today, if our most iconic, beautiful buildings required, like the pyramids,
25,000 laborers hand-stacking mud-brick over a 20-year period, that would be
bad design. If our intra-city train systems ran above-ground, powered by
steam, that would be bad design.

It's not Graphic Designers who are ruining anything, just as it's not Teachers
who are ruining public education. It's bad Designers using inefficient
methods.

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Valdemar
Just one comment:

"Last I checked, “bandwidth” is an infinite resource..."

No it is not. There has to be infrastructure to carry that bandwidth, so there
is a very real and physical limit on bandwidth. Also, in many countries,
bandwidth costs money. Downloading costs money. I know that in America it is
easy to find unlimited internet plans (or close to it), but in many countries
every gigabyte you downloads costs money. My limit is 40 gigabytes, for which
I pay about 40 dollars. After that, every 10 gigabytes I download is an
additional 6 dollars.

~~~
DanBC
Prices for "mobile broadband dongles with data" in the UK. Surprisingly
expensive, and they have Fair Use policies. A big plan would be 1 GB per
month.

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3605265>)

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cdata
Take a look at ad placement technology if you want a likely culprit for why
any given website is making an excessive number of requests per-page-load. In
addition to whatever resource is placed immediately onto the page (and the
ultimate ad creative), most ad snippets also bring in tracking beacons,
additional JavaScript and completely new documents. Designers have a part to
play in this, but I would argue that lack of engineering innovation is at
fault for the shameful state of ad placement technology today.

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gb
If designers are to blame at all, it's as much the fault of clients that won't
back down when asking the designers to add more and more to every page.

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ehutch79
technical note. bandwidth is NOT infinite. comcast certainly doesn't give me
infiniteMB/s hell i don't get the 100MB/s i pay for.

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rjurney
They did a decade ago, with Flash. Now we're getting it back :)

