I'm a developer who has spent the better part of the last year engrossing myself in UX and design education. I disagree that designers are inherently perfectionists; that is simply an effect of trying hard to be your best. I have found that being obsessive about making awesome code has transferred quite well to web design.
The "just learn it yourself" camp is being a little delusional if they think you're going to be able to pick up something and do it well. I respect the bootstrappers who are making lemonade out of their lemons, I'm one of them myself, but it takes more than a couple weekends to develop quality skills. Sometimes you should just bite the bullet and delegate where necessary.
I hired an illustrator for one of my recent side-projects because I found it more important to have good work done rather than doing something badly myself and wasting a bunch of time in the process. If the skill is something you will utilize frequently in the future, then it might be worth the up-front cost. But sometimes it's more efficient to raise the money to pay a real pro rather than do it yourself, even as a one-man team. Frugal means not only saving money but also saving time: both need to be considered in the equation.
Designers actively refine their craft on the job; especially in startup environments, where one regularly attempts the unknown. Having pride in your work can be the elbow grease that keeps you learning after Photoshop quits.
Moreover, consider the position of a designer in a startup. You are often outnumbered by engineers, who can mindmeld to solve really tricky problems; you are responsible for the coltish first days of the company brand; you are the de-facto copy-writer, publicist, and user advocate. You are the weak link in the iteration chain; if you call in sick, there's no one to put lipstick on the pig. Engineers will force you to defend decisions you experienced as intuitions, and there is little expectation that engineers learn your professional vocabulary. (See: for example, the sneering aside the author makes about typographic leading)
In response to that pressure, I've learned that it's important to refocus on what the user needs. If most users are newcomers, and the front page has a gigantic bounce rate, then it's time to throw down some dank design work. (If the engineers balk, explain and continue). If most users bounce on the FAQ, maybe its time to think about "vertical rhythm," or typeface choices, or navigation schemes.
As long as you're fighting for the user, there's no harm in picking your battles. You're the design professional; make a professional design, and the company succeeds in helping the user.
re: (See: for example, the sneering aside the author makes about typographic leading)
That sneering aside illustrates precisely one of my pet peeves. Namely, that the current tools for web typography embody a tremendous leap backwards in ease of use, compared to print design tools.
In the print world, it's quite easy to create variations in leading. Contrary to the author's assertion, leading matters a great deal.
The current requirements that one write code to achieve sophisticated typography remind me of the terminal-based typesetting machines that were common up until the early 1990s. You entered your text on a green-screen monitor, added codes for size, italics, bold, and so forth, and it came out of a Linotronic machine on photographic paper. After being developed, the paper was pasted into the layout.
Hopefully the state of the art in web typography will one day advance beyond technology that was obsolete in the print world some twenty years ago.
Seems to be a lot of stereotyping here: "The sites they make for themselves tend to be minimalist and hipster-ish." - Seems to me like the author is cherry picking his examples in order to make his point.
IMHO, design isn't about just making things "pretty" — a web designer should be concerned with how the interface works and persuading someone to do something (sign up, read more, etc), and making the interface pretty is only part of the equation. It's also making things readable, making things easy to use, your conversion elements easy to find. It isn't just popping yourself into Photoshop and learning how to make a gradient.
Learning how to do this yourself takes a lot of time, and a lot of trial and error to find out works and what doesn't. Great web designers do this instinctually, it isn't something you're going to magically pick up after a few hours and your first design.
I'm all for scrapping something together to launch something as fast as possible, but having someone around who specializes in making your interfaces work and convert is important at some point.
I'm not convinced that great designers do things completely instinctively as they go along but fact of the matter is it does take a lot of time (especially if you're spending 90% of your time learning how to do everything), and I have no doubt that a great designer can do at least as good of a job as I in a fraction of the time (and probably a much better job at that).
In the end, I don't see design being all that different from coding. Sure a PHP kiddie could write some crazy first person shooter by copying/pasting code for a couple of years, but Carmack will sneeze during dinner and put him to shame with his phlegm alone.
So sure, people should go and do things themselves if they have the luxury of time and patience. Everyone else can go and hire someone better than them, if they have the luxury of money and practicality.
I talked to the lead UX designer, and he really emphasized their iterative process. AIGA’s site isn’t graphically styled heavily, but it is very well designed.
What the author describes is the equivalent of premature optimisation for design. I regularly advocate a "get something up then refine" approach to our clients but it's difficult. They don't want to bear the extra costs and usually don't understand the need. And when you present that first comp to them and it doesn't look perfect, they will balk, first round or not. Startups are more interested in the approach, but then they really don't like the extra costs :-)
Secondly, as other people have pointed out, design isn't just aesthetics. It is also, and primarily in the case in web design, about functionality and usability. If you have hired a good design agency are only using them to "make things pretty" then you are underutilising them.
Finally 20% can mean a lot of value. In some cases it's the "winning edge" over your competitor (aka life of death) and in others it's 20% of revenue. Admittedly spending huge amounts on a site that only nets a few thousands a month is silly but if the site is big enough it makes perfect sense.
The real reason Web Designers suck at Web Design is that they use different tool from the developers, and a pixel perfect layout will not survive contact with 'the enemy'. Where 'the enemy' = different default font sizes, fractionally different rendering rules for different browsers (and different versions of the same browser), etc etc.
EVEN APPLE CANNOT GET THIS RIGHT.
Yeah bitches, you read me right. :D Even Apple screws this up.
Classic Example:
Using Safari, to view the Apple store, http://store.apple.com all you needed to do to screw up their beautiful layout was to change the default font size.
Also, when they introduced the iPhone, it wasn't available in all countries, so in countries where it wasn't available there were weird gaps, and other basic errors in their layout.
Also... grey text on grey background... not good.
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Funnily enough, anyone that holds themselves up as a usability expert is almost guaranteed to have a website that induces seizures and/or vomiting. Jakob Nielsen (sp?) being the classic extreme example of this.
The lesson of "good enough" is an important one to learn, but when all your competitors are "good enough" too, you need a differentiator; if you're going to differentiate yourself with better design, that's where a designer who does think about things like incremental leading can make a difference.
The designers are the people who don't just tell you that something looks good or even tell you why it looks good; they're the people that make it look good.
If you're getting results from designers that you believe anyone could replicate, maybe the problem isn't that all designers suck, it's that your designers suck.
in my experience, its relatively easy to hit that 60-80% (or what have you) spot where your design neither "sucks" or is "awesome". most people have a low threshold for what constitues good design, and i agree that a lot of little details that we put into our work sometimes just end up being overlooked.
THAT SAID, i disagree w/ this guys notion to just focus on that 20% and neglect the rest. granted this is pure opinion, but there's something extra that can't be describe when you see a design that just "works". i believe those designers who achieve that never got there by just being satisfied with throwing a bunch of web 2.0 elements on a page w/ a grid and calling it a day.
If only 0.5% of your visitors will notice something, but this is 0.5% of a very large number (because your site is already successful), then go for it. The point is that perfectionism is not the right attitude when you're building a minimum viable product.
i agree, if you're trying to put out an MVP you have to know when to something is good enough and to just put it out there. i'm not advocating that you sacrifice a deadline or goal for perfection (if that's even possible)
i was speaking more to the attitude of the article. it's not so much what percentage will notice, but a designer's motivations for doing so. the best designers i know have this attention to detail, almost to a fault, and it shows in their work. do they still get things out on time and know when to cut corners? of course. but it's precisely that attention to detail that pushes them to improve.
sorry that was really longwinded, but imo, guys that embrace the attitude of that author tend to have a skewed sense of what is "adequate", anyway. he could have better proved made his point by showing the tradeoffs vs. this blanket, designers suck stance.
I think in the end it's how saturated the market is. If all your competitors have polished fronts, having one that's rough around the edges will certainly put you at a disadvantage, and vise versa.
Also, for the love of all that is (un)holy, please stop with the Web 2.0 trend of using 30%+ white space on either side of the page. If I have a 1600 pixel wide screen, why should 1000 pixels be dead space??? It's insanity!
12-15 words per line is a pretty good guide for readability, and if you have a minimal interface like Posterous, then naturally the article is going to extend with a lot of white space on either side.
Then tile two browser windows next to each other vertically. I personally recommend XMonad, but you can use any other window manager or tool to help with that.
Various studies (and my own experience) suggest that there is an ideal number of words per line that improves readability. Blogs are rarely well served by full-width designs, except as a way of adding ads or navigation elements. I do think the font size should be bigger.
The "just learn it yourself" camp is being a little delusional if they think you're going to be able to pick up something and do it well. I respect the bootstrappers who are making lemonade out of their lemons, I'm one of them myself, but it takes more than a couple weekends to develop quality skills. Sometimes you should just bite the bullet and delegate where necessary.
I hired an illustrator for one of my recent side-projects because I found it more important to have good work done rather than doing something badly myself and wasting a bunch of time in the process. If the skill is something you will utilize frequently in the future, then it might be worth the up-front cost. But sometimes it's more efficient to raise the money to pay a real pro rather than do it yourself, even as a one-man team. Frugal means not only saving money but also saving time: both need to be considered in the equation.