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.
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.