

You are not a designer and I am not a musician - MrAlmostWrong
http://www.drawar.com/articles/you-are-not-a-designer-and-i-am-not-a-musician/55/

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scorxn
"Web designer" is just a way to tell people what you do. Doesn't mean you're
good at it, or formally trained. There's an artist outside that isn't Picasso.
Still calls himself an artist.

The web is just a really easy place to find (and apparently dwell on and
become offended by) novices.

Edit: As I think about it, this attitude really bothers me. I used to work at
a design agency where my boss would pin poor resumés to a wall for group
mockery. That kind of snobbish behavior is a plague based on insecurity.
Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and formal education is not always the
answer.

Furthermore, until some body starts issuing professional licenses for "web
designer," it really doesn't matter what individuals think of the term.

~~~
stilist
Totally agree. I don’t think I’m a _good_ designer, but I do design things, so
I’m a designer. Same for programming and cooking.

The world has enough elitism. Don’t make it worse.

~~~
presidentender
Credentialism (even for lawyers and doctors) isn't my favorite thing, but it's
defensible by fairly reasonable people. But this baseless elitism is just too
much.

"I'm not an astronaut" because I don't go to space, but "I am a musician"
because I play the guitar, despite the fact that I do it poorly and have no
formal education.

~~~
potatolicious
The problem here is that the design field doesn't seem to have separate forums
for amateurs and professional.

I'm into photography, and that community has sorted this out fairly well (for
good reason, it's much older than the craft of web design). There are amateur
forums (where professionals participate, but nothing is judged for commercial
quality), and there are professional galleries where people who do it for a
living put their best work forward.

Nearly every place that showcases photography sits on one side of this divide
- and make this context clear. You're either a place to show portfolio-level
work, or you're strictly for-fun. This keeps the marketplace clear, and also
doesn't confuse people trying to hire photographers.

Web design galleries like the one above don't seem to do this, so in a way
they're the cause of their own problems. One hit wonders are only a problem if
they're trying to get hired doing it, they're simply not a problem at the
amateur level.

~~~
presidentender
I have to admit, it seems a little odd to me that there's a clear divide in
photography. The barrier to entry is low, and the quality of a photographer's
output is somewhat subjective. Does my friend with his $500 camera, who gets
paid (albeit rarely) to take pictures, fall on the "pro" or "amateur" side of
things?

~~~
potatolicious
It depends entirely on where he puts his work - if he only puts his work on
Flickr, then he's likely amateur. If he's submitting his work to sites where
professionals troll for work, then he is by definition professional.

Which isn't to say professionals don't Flickr their pictures - they do, but
the judgment that their work gets is different on the two sides of the fence.

In either case, someone looking to hire a photographer will not have to dig
through pages upon pages of amateur work, and in a forum of professionals,
unskilled amateur work becomes painfully apparent.

------
ggruschow
_Once you label me, you negate me._ \- Kierkegaard

 _Specialization is for insects._ \- Heinlein

 _Eat my shorts._ \- Simpson

------
jordanb
For all the pretension in this piece, I think the design on that page is
pretty poor.

Serifed fonts can be very pretty on the page, but are tricky to use on the
web. The low resolution (~100ppi) of current monitors brutalizes them in small
sizes. Trying to use them the way he's doing is the result of an ignorance of
the limitations of his medium.

Reading through the article (after magnifying a few times to make it
readable), he seems to be grappling for some "arteest" notion of design.

The fact is though, that designers have work because a very large number of
web sites need published. They do not need to be masterpieces. They need to
support and conform to the needs of the information and workflow of the site.
They need to support and reinforce the client's brand. And they need to not
turn people away by being archaic or ugly.

You don't need a Pollock or Warhol to do that kind of work. In fact, it'd be a
terrific waste of money to hire that kind of talent to design an online store.
There is an army of solid designers out there who can meet the above
requirements.

I'd also like to add that, as a web developer, I find print designers (or
designers who went to school and studied print design) to be the absolute
worst to work with. They do not understand the limitations of the web. They
don't make designs that can flow, and can handle content created by the client
through their CMS. They produce unusably rigid designs and then get emotional
when they're changed to meet the needs of the client.

~~~
joeblubaugh
I agree about design problems on that page. Why is there no left margin? My
lizard brain kept wanting to scroll left, since the edges of the letters were
kissing the window border.

------
smeatish
Designers resort to snobbery because they operate in a realm where everyone
has an opinion, and thus they need to distinguish their opinions from those of
the untrained in order to reinforce their value. It's a rational, albeit
unfortunate, response.

They are the experts who are tasked with deciding on the color of the "bike
shed": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_shed>

------
anonjon
"No, you are not a designer. You are someone that can piece together some
stuff in Photoshop or add the right pieces of code in XHTML/CSS. You aren’t
the person that creates experiences. You aren’t the translator of ideas that
people never thought could be produced visually. You aren’t the person that
can toss their own style to the curb and come up with something even greater
because of it."

I am not a computer programmer, i am just someone who throws together some
characters in emacs which compile on a computer for the most part but
sometimes crash. I am not a person who creates codes that have not previously
been thought to be creatable. I am not making the world an unimaginably better
place of incredible grandiousity. I totally lack the condescention and hubris
required to be the ONE TRUE PROGRAMMER.

