You are not a designer and I am not a musician | Hacker News Reader

You are not a designer and I am not a musician

drawar.com

24 pointsMrAlmostWrong17 comments

"Web designer" is just a way to tell people what you do. Doesn't mean you're good at it, or formally trained. There's an artist outside that isn't Picasso. Still calls himself an artist.

The web is just a really easy place to find (and apparently dwell on and become offended by) novices.

Edit: As I think about it, this attitude really bothers me. I used to work at a design agency where my boss would pin poor resumés to a wall for group mockery. That kind of snobbish behavior is a plague based on insecurity. Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and formal education is not always the answer.

Furthermore, until some body starts issuing professional licenses for "web designer," it really doesn't matter what individuals think of the term.

Totally agree. I don’t think I’m a good designer, but I do design things, so I’m a designer. Same for programming and cooking.

The world has enough elitism. Don’t make it worse.

Credentialism (even for lawyers and doctors) isn't my favorite thing, but it's defensible by fairly reasonable people. But this baseless elitism is just too much.

"I'm not an astronaut" because I don't go to space, but "I am a musician" because I play the guitar, despite the fact that I do it poorly and have no formal education.

The problem here is that the design field doesn't seem to have separate forums for amateurs and professional.

I'm into photography, and that community has sorted this out fairly well (for good reason, it's much older than the craft of web design). There are amateur forums (where professionals participate, but nothing is judged for commercial quality), and there are professional galleries where people who do it for a living put their best work forward.

Nearly every place that showcases photography sits on one side of this divide - and make this context clear. You're either a place to show portfolio-level work, or you're strictly for-fun. This keeps the marketplace clear, and also doesn't confuse people trying to hire photographers.

Web design galleries like the one above don't seem to do this, so in a way they're the cause of their own problems. One hit wonders are only a problem if they're trying to get hired doing it, they're simply not a problem at the amateur level.

I have to admit, it seems a little odd to me that there's a clear divide in photography. The barrier to entry is low, and the quality of a photographer's output is somewhat subjective. Does my friend with his $500 camera, who gets paid (albeit rarely) to take pictures, fall on the "pro" or "amateur" side of things?

It depends entirely on where he puts his work - if he only puts his work on Flickr, then he's likely amateur. If he's submitting his work to sites where professionals troll for work, then he is by definition professional.

Which isn't to say professionals don't Flickr their pictures - they do, but the judgment that their work gets is different on the two sides of the fence.

In either case, someone looking to hire a photographer will not have to dig through pages upon pages of amateur work, and in a forum of professionals, unskilled amateur work becomes painfully apparent.

The photographic amateur may be better-educated, better-equipped and better-practiced than the professional. He may know things about lenses, filters, lighting and gamma correction that an Ansel Adams would never have considered. The difference is that, when faced with a difficult or seemingly impossible shoot, the amateur will explain why it can't be done (or at least why it can't be done satisfactorily) and walk away, while the pro will explain why the customer's vision may need to be reigned in a bit, but will find a way to get it done the best way possible if the customer insists. It's not just "anything for a buck", but having a professional attitude toward customer service.

I think because the mode of criticism and the mode of presentation are the same (the Internet), snobs feel especially threatened and forced to put down amateurs. It'd be like amateur and pro photographs hanging in a gallery side-by-side. Meanwhile, the forum you're describing is a neutral ground on another medium.

Also, a snob who is truly threatened by amateurs is either a) a poor designer himself, or b) a cynic who doesn't respect his audience enough to know good design from bad. In either case, he's not fun to work with.

I don't think you're being entirely fair - there is a problem with amateurs who reach beyond their abilities. A professional designer generates good work on demand, as opposed to an amateur one who does so at their own pace.

In this case, the amateur can have a portfolio of works he's done over years, cherry picking the best, and looking as good as the professional who can do this three times over every week.

And customers do not know this. This is the same as it goes in photography: amateurs who have a hit rate of 1% or less can still accumulate a respectable body of good work by sheer time and volume alone. This doesn't mean you can shove them into a wedding reception and get results.

I've met many a wedding photographer who complain of amateurs taking their business - and then failing to deliver, thus damaging the image of commercial photographers as a whole.

It's hard to say where the line is drawn between competent and incompetent, but either way I think the concern is at least a valid one - there's no good way to surface the real, regularly reproducible quality of work for a designer.

Yeah, my characterization is unfair. I have a special reservoir of irrational resentment for anyone who would put down someone who creates things, is curious, and actively tries to improve, regardless of his background or current ability.

I respect your point about amateur posturing. But I also believe most professionals have to go through that eventually. Sometimes the only way to grow is to overpromise and work your ass off. I don't think that's dishonest, so long as the second part holds true.

Product is the only real criterion for judgment, isn't it? There are people who are really, really good at design, but who are almost completely unaware of the rules they intuitively follow, and there are others who've spent years (or decades) learning the rules, the history, the trends, and can write long, scholarly papers about the subject, but who cannot create anything original. (I fall into the latter category, by the way -- but at least I'm aware of it. Enough people are pleased with my reiterations of past successes that I'm not too disappointed with the rut I'm stuck in. And there are few surprises in store for the clients when they are free to ask "can we have that one in blue?")

Once you label me, you negate me. - Kierkegaard

Specialization is for insects. - Heinlein

Eat my shorts. - Simpson

For all the pretension in this piece, I think the design on that page is pretty poor.

Serifed fonts can be very pretty on the page, but are tricky to use on the web. The low resolution (~100ppi) of current monitors brutalizes them in small sizes. Trying to use them the way he's doing is the result of an ignorance of the limitations of his medium.

Reading through the article (after magnifying a few times to make it readable), he seems to be grappling for some "arteest" notion of design.

The fact is though, that designers have work because a very large number of web sites need published. They do not need to be masterpieces. They need to support and conform to the needs of the information and workflow of the site. They need to support and reinforce the client's brand. And they need to not turn people away by being archaic or ugly.

You don't need a Pollock or Warhol to do that kind of work. In fact, it'd be a terrific waste of money to hire that kind of talent to design an online store. There is an army of solid designers out there who can meet the above requirements.

I'd also like to add that, as a web developer, I find print designers (or designers who went to school and studied print design) to be the absolute worst to work with. They do not understand the limitations of the web. They don't make designs that can flow, and can handle content created by the client through their CMS. They produce unusably rigid designs and then get emotional when they're changed to meet the needs of the client.

I agree about design problems on that page. Why is there no left margin? My lizard brain kept wanting to scroll left, since the edges of the letters were kissing the window border.

Designers resort to snobbery because they operate in a realm where everyone has an opinion, and thus they need to distinguish their opinions from those of the untrained in order to reinforce their value. It's a rational, albeit unfortunate, response.

They are the experts who are tasked with deciding on the color of the "bike shed": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_shed

"No, you are not a designer. You are someone that can piece together some stuff in Photoshop or add the right pieces of code in XHTML/CSS. You aren’t the person that creates experiences. You aren’t the translator of ideas that people never thought could be produced visually. You aren’t the person that can toss their own style to the curb and come up with something even greater because of it."

I am not a computer programmer, i am just someone who throws together some characters in emacs which compile on a computer for the most part but sometimes crash. I am not a person who creates codes that have not previously been thought to be creatable. I am not making the world an unimaginably better place of incredible grandiousity. I totally lack the condescention and hubris required to be the ONE TRUE PROGRAMMER.

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