I can't tell if you're saying that visual/graphic designers are saying they are doing "UX", or if "UX" people are really just hand-waving visual designers?
I got lost around "wank word" and UX being the "Web 2.0 of the design world." Most UX people I know are focused on user research, usability, information architecture, and interaction design. I'd say maybe, 1 in 5 are visual designers, and maybe 1 in 3 have any passable graphic design skill at all.
Maybe you're saying that people will be just called "user researcher", "information architect", etc etc and not use the word UX. But I think "wank word" is a tad inaccurate.
I am saying that "Design" encompasses a lot of skills, many of which are "invisible" to most laymen- much in the same way that most of the code a developer writes is "invisible" making two pieces of software that outwardly appear to operate identically, can, in terms of code structure, maintainability, be vastly different in quality.
Most people in hiring positions couldn't give two shits that a designer is supposed to do more than just make things pretty- And so they hire people who call themselves "designers" that actually are little more than glorified photoshop operators. Why? because these "designers" are cheaper than these other "designers" and it's not obvious why. The amateurs undercut the professionals.
This puts the real designers, the ones with educations, that actually know design principles, typography, psychology, etc, and have years of experience- in the difficult situation of having to distinguish themselves from these interested amateurs- these "stylists". So I believe, in a turn of marketing genius, some designers came up with the term "UX", and insist that it is NOT this lowly "design" thing, as you know it. It's this totally different thing that is /more/ than just making things look pretty.
Even though, all the things under the "UX" banner are familiar to people with design educations as "design".
That's what "Design" is. UX is just "Design". These are the normal things that you have to do to make a design work.
But how do you communicate that? How do you communicate that Javascript and HTML are capable of so much more now, than they were 5 years ago? You come up with a buzz word. Ajax. Web 2.0. HTML5. To experts who actually know their craft, these are obvious wank words. Meaningless checkboxes that accountants and recruiters can look for on resumes, designed to repackage skills that are decades old as something new and exciting.
But this is hacker news. We shouldn't have to use bullshit marketing terms here. That's for recruiters. That's for clients. Cut the shit, I say. Use the real words with their real meanings.
I'll agree with what TheZenPsycho said and add my own bit.
I think designers are getting worse and worse at doing one aspect of design and so they ignore it and latch onto a term that purposefully disregards that aspect. So a UX designer would scoff at the visual design aspect because that's not part of their job.
In most cases, outside of huge companies, a designer does pretty much every aspect of what most people consider to be design; visual, UX, UI, Information architecture, research, and branding. That's what designers are trained to do, that's the point of being a designer, you NEED to know how to do all of these things in order to call yourself a designer.
I got lost around "wank word" and UX being the "Web 2.0 of the design world." Most UX people I know are focused on user research, usability, information architecture, and interaction design. I'd say maybe, 1 in 5 are visual designers, and maybe 1 in 3 have any passable graphic design skill at all.
Maybe you're saying that people will be just called "user researcher", "information architect", etc etc and not use the word UX. But I think "wank word" is a tad inaccurate.