It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks

> What happened around that time, in 2010 or so, that I mentioned? Well, the area of front-end work, which has been heavily gendered as "feminine" work, was finally being viewed as "serious" or "real" programming* because, to no one's surprise, something that is designed well is good for business.

I disagree, what happened was that javascript got fast and now everyone wanted web apps instead of web pages. Web designers makes web pages, documents with little javascript. Web developers makes web apps with huge amounts of javascript. They are two very different roles, it makes sense to have different job titles for them.

>Also, I considered titling this "How the men folk ruined web design"

Ctrl+w

I went into this hoping that it would go more into how web design sucks now, hopefully with more specific critiques. I understand that the typical "web designer that builds entire websites" role is mostly gone now, but how has that actually affected development? Is it any different from other products, where Product Design and Product Development are also different roles?

I've encountered plenty of UI developers that have very little visual design sense and are mostly fine, and I've encounter plenty of UI designers that don't know the intricacies of the front-end. Sure, sometimes those two have to hash things out, but that hasn't seemed to have been a large blocker in my experience; just part of the process.

Back in the day the web designer did everything including the artistic parts of building a website.

Nowadays, most companies building websites have split the responsibilities into multiple roles.

Frontend Engineers aren’t called “web designers” because that’s not what they do. A UX Designer and graphic designer decided how a button should look and feel, and the frontend engineer is the one who implements the functionality in code. They literally are not designers.

The article acknowledges the splitting of the roles but doesn’t explain why this is supposed to be a bad thing. It’s pretty obvious why the split took place: because websites are more complex and standards are higher (unless you think the space jam website is the pinnacle of web design).

I agree that the modern web design greatly suffered from lacking actual "designers", but don't think it's purely a gender issue (I mean, this field does have an overwhelmingly huge gender issue but also some more). I can say this because I actually worked with web designers as late as in 2020, and it was quite hard to communicate what is needed for modularized UIs. Probably designers see the whole picture while programmers like me see individual components---no one is incorrect, but you'd need a good way to reconcile them. Without such reconcilation, programmers tend to take designers' job away because they at least can make a working app by themselves.

Curious take. I mean, I've been building websites since the late 1990s and I agree that there are very few people working today who understand the whole stack but that's because it is more complicated now. But it's a big leap to suggest that that's down to sexism (and I'm not denying that sexism in tech is a real problem). I'm not at all convinced that "front end developer" and "web designer" are the same job. They both still exist as separate roles. Some people can do both, same as some people do frontend and backend web dev. But they're not the same role.

This is awkward. I get that there's sexism in tech, no argument there. But it's just not true that web design was sprung from whole cloth as a new discipline and then later became gendered at women coders' expense. I was there in the 90s, and designers were already there, and yes there was already gender bias. The thing was, the bulk of designers in the 90s used PageMaker/InDesign/Illustrator and it took a while for that discipline to converge with HCI and UI design. These things sort of converged in the web world later, and yes there was gender bias, but that bias existed historically. Furthermore, if you go further back, before my time, there was much greater representation of women in programming and "making computers go beep boop" which had steadily declined over many decades.

I won't presume to analyze the root causes of gender bias in tech, but it's just lazy thinking to blame the decline of the hybrid designer/coder as being due to sexism and "role gendering". The more obvious answer is that the depth of expertise needed for modern UX design and front-end development grew by a lot, and hence the generic "web designer" role disappeared in favor of greater specialization. Blaming this on the patriarchy might get you sympathy and clicks in the current zeitgest, but it doesn't really say antyhing about causality or what's actually going on.

> the gendering of design as women's work

WTF? This is the literally first time I've heard someone describe web-design as "women's work."

I find myself worrying that it's the opening move of some sort of "damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't" scenario from the author, e.g.: "Oh, so it's men's work!? How sexist!"

This article is the first time in 20 years of doing this that I've ever heard of UX/design work referred to as "feminine"

A web designer, whatever her gender, is a dude who makes websites, including the design. The programmers finally were able to do that too when frameworks aka bootstrap did the design for them. That’s why all corporate websites look the same and nowadays the self employed genders can get design and programming from the WordPress so the majority of their sites looks like that too or they can hire someone who can’t program or design but knows how to put the text and the images into WordPress or joomla and if the favicon of the result is custom they are above average. Real web designers are incredibly rare and they don’t do tutorials. Even Rachel Andrews or Jen Simmons, who are great web designers don’t fully qualify. Designing and typing into a computer are just too far apart. All tutorials are from YouTube professionals and they always include a framework because web developers can’t do design, they ‘build’ websites from components. And here’s the thing, the dev parts of a site can be formalized (thank you thank you thank you Andy) while the design aspect cannot. So designers can now do real web design, web developers can disassociate their opinions from their employer, Andy can give awesome key notes and companies can hire companies to get their flavor of bootreact on rails or whathaveyou. All webdev sucks but Webdesign for the small web sucks less.

"I don't know how else to answer this, besides: the gendering of design as women's work is why people don't use the title "web designer" anymore."

Yeah ... nope. The reason for the split (and I think it started earlier) is that front-end development changed from being a bit of HTML, CSS and a smattering of JS or PHP, to real actual structured, architected programming with complex frameworks etc. Web design similarly become something much more professional, and more aligned with design in other fields. Therefore 'web design' carried an air of amateurism, and was no longer fashionable versus simply 'design'.

This perspective that design is a feminine job must seem true from a certain lived experience, but... it must not be universally true because it seems pretty obviously false from other experiences.

I've never heard that web design is a "femine" work. Anyone knows where the author lives? So different culture

I posted this not because I thought it would be inflammatory, but because I very much agreed with the point that design is not as far “to the left” as it should be

I started out as an animator/designer, and then became a developer. I became a developer because I wanted to write plugins for the 3D modelling software I used. Over the decades I have become extremely jaded at how companies I have worked for organise into “UX Design” and “Development” teams. It is utter nonsense

Everyone I have worked with, once trained, is capable of doing both — perhaps not everyone tackles design or development with the same passion, but teams who have comfort with both areas of app/web design and development often produce superior products

Now I am in a position to build a team at a company that is divided into “UX” and “Development.” I hope to ask people on the design team to install Xcode and Android Studio, to get comfortable making quick prototypes in Compose and SwiftUI, to update asset catalogues and colours, and to make branches and commit changes. Designers are genuinely excited about this

Similarly, I have started giving developers edit access to Figma, helping them produce design and visually communicate on a Figma board, tweak and suggest designs, and even build parts that can be approved by people on the “design team.” Developers have no problem doing this

I am hoping that the lines between “designer” and “developer” dissolve and we simply have coordinated teams, with talented people able to direct the vision for both aspects of a product

In my personal side projects everyone is treated as both designer and developer, no one “blindly implements” design (which I have experienced at many large companies) and no one creates design without understanding the nuances of the platform. This results in much less back-and-forth, and products that ship with more consistent UI design

So are the blinking banners owned by the women web designers?

I never knew that web design and gender were so intertwined. Color me informed.

> gendering of web design

YMMV but personally, while I've met both male and female developers of all stripes and strats, I’ve only met male web designers, so this thesis doesn’t resonate strongly with me.