Fire your designer
blog.teambox.com
Why do programmers learn new technologies all the time, while designers are stuck in the 90s with their mockups?
blog.teambox.com
I spend a lot of time at my job fixing design by designers who don't code, and I'd love for them to read it, but I'm not going to waste my time. (I'm a usability guy/front-end developer who does know how to code and design.)
In those cases, I'm happy to hire someone and code it myself, after all, I'd much rather they be knock-your-socks-off-good at web design than someone who is only decent at design, and okay at integrating.
We get people that are really, really good artist and that is what we want from them a good artistic comp. Trying to force them to cross the bound to writing HTML and CSS that will be used in a complex web application adds additional constraints to finding talented people.
In that case we would need an exceptional artist that can write HTML and CSS that is componentized so we can bust it up into widgets, if not we accept sub-par HTML for what we need. It limits the pool of talent.
Now conversely if we only require a comp we broaden our pool of truly talented people. Further when we go to look for good browser app UX developers, we don't put the constraint on them of being an exceptional artist. Just finding someone who is versed in Human Factors, HCI and interaction that can produce clean reusable code is hard enough, throw in top 10%er artistic skills and you have really constrained the market.
Instead of fighting those market realities we work with them. We hire artist to do art and developers to develop. It works out well because each are exceptional at their core competencies. It also works well because we can hire freelance artist on a per project basis therefore maximizing out investment in art instead of trying to force an artist to do HTML to keep them busy on the pay roll.
Ok, fair enough to ask. Here's the answer. As a creative director, art director and designer, I deal extensively with the business case for the project, the marketing, the concept and copy writing, editing, photography, illustration, layout, information design, domain name selection, branding, and several other areas. (There are in fact many people who specialize in just one of the areas I mentioned above; and I’ll note that no one asks these specialists why they don’t know CSS.) Every one of those areas is about “producing results.” Would it be fair or reasonable to ask a programmer to learn all of the above? I don't think so.
Beyond the points of fairness and reasonableness is the point that while design is about "how it works," (which is a very deep area I won't delve into at the moment) the issue of "how it looks" is also a major part of it. If the visual appearance doesn’t satisfy the requirements, no amount of CSS expertise will save the day.
Furthermore, those who have expertise in making things look good (in addition to the other areas I mentioned above) often have no interest or ability in coding. In fact, they are working in a (primarily) visual discipline because they have a distaste for coding, if they’ve tried it; or simply a total lack of interest.
I might point out that print design (in contrast to web design) is completely isolated from involvement with code. When I hit the “print” button, my software will generate the PostScript code for me. In this respect, the tools for print design are far ahead of those for web design.
Have you ever opened up a PostScript file? I can assure you, it’s several orders of magnitude more complex than an html/css file. No one would ever ask a designer to edit the PostScript code; such a ludicrous request would be dismissed out of hand. (Although I had to do some PostScript editing many times when I worked in prepress.)
Getting back to the Pablo’s question, I have to turn it around and ask: why isn’t there a “visual design” tool with the ease of, say, QuarkXPress, that can output programmer-friendly code? Serious question. While Quark can in fact output html, it’s very bad html. Likewise, one constantly hears complaints about the code generated by Dreamweaver and other tools that offer a modicum of visual editing. There’s clearly a market opportunity for software that can bring the sophistication and ease of use that print designers enjoy to the wide world of web design. (Anyone interested in exploring that market opportunity should contact me.)
To me, an integrator (HTML / front-end JS) an art director, a usubility expert are different roles. Can you find somebody that do all this ? Of course, but if you just hire a "designer" without being more specific about your needs, you will end up in a situation like this.
If you're not hiring employees, but are relying on freelancers, I question just how reasonable it is to have a designer use your templating languages and other tools instead of standard ones such as plain HTML and CSS. There are exceptions though: things like Wordpress and jQuery are common enough that you can easily find freelancers who'll be able to use them (but they're not common enough that every freelancer will).
Car designer has to work within constrains (materials, engineering, production capabilities, market so on ). He has to understand these things at least a little bit, work them out with colleagues from respective fields.
So does web designer, product designer, packaging designer, book designer and so on. This is why they are called designers and not artists (constrains, utilitarian purpose). The term it self means that this person understands aesthetics _plus_ has other knowledge of working in a specific field.
So if you hire some guy who can draw a nice face or make a poster to do your interface, sorry but this is your problem. You would be surprised how many designers out there start with wire frames, user interviews and glancing through ux and usability books before they even think about doing anything in PS.
@michokest: I have to use teambox on one project now, possibly it's a good thing that you fired yours.
If he does not care, it's his problem but if you don't then you should not blame him for anything.
btw, Isn't UX secondary for a developer too?
It depends, color pallet selection would be an example, we have a specific pallet that we use that works for color blind individuals, that pallet was created by our UX professionals, it is provided to the artist as a requirement of the project. What colors that are selected out of that pallet is a function of the artist job.
A/B testing, what color schemes work well is the function of the usability analyst. As that is not a detail that can be front ran.
These are three distinct roles and sure you can hire one guy and he may be decent in 2 but 10 to 1 he is not going to be top of the industry in all 3. 1 if you are lucky, so you have to make the decision do you want one guy doing 2 sun par secondary responsibilities or 3 guys doing their primary role better than any one guy could do all three. That is not to say that you don't have generalist, we have a good deal of them but when it comes to art, if you want the best generalist is generally not a skill set that you want to look for.
Look it's obvious that you have some kind of grudge against designers. For your own good at least see the enemy you respect...
Just because I know that as a general rule of thumb, one person can not be the best of the best in all three does not mean I have a grudge against them. I have some generalist who are excellent in all three, but they are rare and that is a market reality.
It just means I know that there are a lot of hacks that pass themselves off as masters of all three. When the reality is they usually have mediocre skills in HCI if any at all. I have never seen an industry where people pass themselves off as a professional of a field of scientific study, when they have never cracked a book on HCI and have no idea what human factors is. In any other study this would be considered fraud. Just because I know that 80% of designers have no exposure to HCI methods, does not mean that I dislike or have a grudge against them. It just means that they need to either be trained in HCI or not allowed to own that task in my orginization. They are distinctly different disciplines and require completely different education and toolsets. If that depresses you then so be it, but don't accuse me of bias because you don't like or don't know the facts. It is incredulous and a logical fallacy.
Version control systems oriented toward "creative" are very visual and expensive (like alienbrain) primarily due to the fact that the cost of adding proprietary format parsing capability. And you will not be able to convince the vast majority of designers to use Gimp or inkscape.
I would say that the web developer community needs to promote use of open formats for design composition, perhaps if we can get rid of AI and PSD as standard compositional formats we will make some progress, it is starting to work with Flash.
Pixelnovel timeline is reasonably good, although currently their storage plans are quite small. Adobe's own version cue server (which they annoyingly discontinued) is pretty usable as well.
Hopefully the Adobe Drive stuff they've recently rolled out will end up integrated into one of the big (D)VCS's, so we can finally start managing digital assets as easily as code.
I don't think that you're ever going to get the dev community to force format changes on Adobe, because the chances or someone really building a solid competitor that you'd need to pass files back and forth from are so low.
Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692932
Cases in point are sites like 99designs and crowdSPRING that launch projects for "uncoded" web designs. My solution: http://www.hackeress.com
Yeah, the site is not finished yet. But it relates to this discussion.
A designer is expected to know Photoshop and... ?
That said, I'm shocked that it seems to be difficult to find designers who also know HTML/CSS. Designers should definitely know how to use these tools as well.
That said, it's expected of developers that they continually learn new tools or improve their knowledge of existing ones. It seems however the same does not apply to designers.
The expertise required of a profession is not quantified by the number of tools it requires, but by the difference in how much value an expert adds vs how much a noob adds. A noob designer will get you something that looks pretty to him or her. A good designer will get you something that gets users excited, tells them what to do, and how to do it, while being accessible to all users, while being extensible, maintainable, and within the constrained imposed by your site structure, CMS, and HTML/CSS/JS. This adds a lot more value than the noob designer, without needing any more tools, just being better at them (although, being familiar enough with your framework to know what's easy and what's hard is useful).
'Expert programmer' doesn't mean what it used to, apparently.