When I say engineering is about making it work, I mean it mostly in the sense that nobody gets to see how the sausage is made. No customer is ever going to critique your code or double check your cement pour. As long as it works, that's all that matters.

On the other hand, the work that a visual designer does is front and center, it is literally the only thing that a client will interact with. For example, when Microsoft introduced Metro that's all anybody talked about (good or bad). Nobody ever talked about what the code looked like that went into producing it. Customers only connect with what they can see.