Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

No shit. Bottom-tier design work was necessary when the default templates for everything were crap and people were ignorant of the technology.

Also, a lot of "designers" and "design agencies" can't code HTML worth crap and the value they provided was minimal.

To me, a good independent designer codes, knows quirks, and also has the eye for design. If you're a larger company and you want the specialists, it's just better to hire them. And if you don't understand the importance of design, there's an unlimited amount of cheap, quality templates out there.

The trivial work for Photoshoppers with a design degree is up.

View on HN

I'd add one more thing - if you look at it closer, web designers never tried or managed to be properly original and diverse. There was always some sort of "magical guidelines" that made everything look in essence the same. Everyone was/is copying everyone else and getting paid for it. I think this has to end sooner or later and template popularity is one of the signs that real value of things is being better recognized.

> Everyone was/is copying everyone else and getting paid for it.

Isn't that just a mixture of technical limitations and fashion.

Technical, financial, organisational, etc. yes, but almost the whole point of creativity is being able to come up with something original, new. If you don't you don't get paid or in this case you don't get paid for long. That's just how things work. I personally find it very sad, that a huge amount of (willing!!!) copy cats call them selves creatives and then somebody calls the whole misguided charade fashion.

edit: just in case - I hope this doesn't offend you, somebody=everybody, I didn't mean anything personal

I think you're underestimating how many creative projects done for clients are very much led by something they've seen before. "Make it like the Tesla site. I love the Tesla site!" At some budget ranges, it's not worth the time to fight that.

And beyond fashion, user expectations are a massive influence. People are wary of right-side navigation, designers know that top-left is the common spot for branding for a reason, etc. There are very practical usability and design reasons that things get pushed down a fixed number of creative paths.

As I've said, there are legit reasons, but my point was that they are being abused too often and this will have consequences.

I personally don't buy this argument. It's the same argument that a writing code in a higher level language. Once we have this HLL we don't need as many programmers because the language does all the heavy lifting. But what we've seen is a shift into different kinds of work. People adapt and get different skills.

But coder output is definitely higher now than ten years ago. And a lot of the work that's out there is of a much lower level of complexity, so the experts now are either working on things which need the requisite knowledge or working in places where their productivity is correctly compensated.

The thing is that a few years ago people were willing to pay designers to make Photoshop templates and that's it. Nowadays this simply won't do, so the work is moving up in complexity and the bottom tier is being handled by people with no specific training.

Finally, just because the work has shifted one way in coding jobs doesn't mean it will work that way in design. It is quite possible that the intermediate knowledge gap being created by better tools and more complex work just won't require people in that area, so we'll have both more experts and more newbies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com