Fake Designers II

I'm calling this post "Fake Designers II" because Paul already wrote a little bit about this topic back in the day. I was talking with him tonight on IM for a few hours about this, and I feel strongly enough about it that I think it warrants a full weblog entry.

I will go out on a limb to say that over 85% of people who consider themselves "web designers" aren't very good at their profession. Yes, I consider myself in that category because I don't consider myself an artist — in fact, I'll be the first one to tell you that a site I've worked on for hours sucks or could've been much better. It takes me hours and hours of work to make something look halfway decent, when a real designer like Jon Hicks probably takes a fourth of the time, and makes it look twice as good. Why? Because he's a real designer.

Look at a site like LA Times.com. The padding is completely off, there is no whitespace where space is needed, Gestalt principles are not followed, and the list goes on and on. But this is a major site, obviously done by people who have the title "Web Designer" or by a consulting team that is full of "web designers". Now, in contrast, take a look at Silverpoint's website, employer of Shaun Inman. Notice anything? Yup, Silverpoint's site was designed by "real designers", notice how it looks great, in contrast to the LATimes site which looks awful.

Both were done by "web designers", but one design looks terrible while the other is amazing.

Here's another example, one that validates the point I'll be making in a second. Take a look at Blogger.com's new website designed by Doug Bowman. Notice how it's really great looking? Now take a look at WordPress.org and take note of the difference. Matt, creator of WordPress is a great guy, but he's not a designer. Doug Bowman, on the other hand, comes from a diverse print background, and is a fantastic designer.

The Disconnect

Being a CSS and XHTML guru does not qualify you to be a web designer. You may know every CSS hack in the book, but if you haven't design experience or background, then you probably aren't very adept at designing anything. The "web design" profession is so amazingly saturated with people from programming backgrounds with no design experience it really astounds me. Yup, I come from a pseudo-programming background, which is why I never tell anyone that I'm a "web designer", because when I look at my stuff compared to Shaun Inman's or Doug Bowman's, it's not even remotely close. That, right there, is the reason I do not consider myself a web designer, because I cannot do what they do. I cannot open Illustrator and bang out a logo for a client in under an hour. I cannot go straight to Photoshop without trial and error on my trusty paper notebook first. Can you?

The Awful Implications

There are rumors discussing how my college, RIT might start up a "Web Design" major soon. I think this is an absolutely god-awful decision, and I'll tell you why.

Good web design is not something that is possible to teach. You can teach how to be a good designer, and then how to work with the internet as a medium for your designs, but teaching "how to design for the web" is just a disaster. It will bring people without a real design background the false sense that they are good web designers, when in fact, they have no design ability but know CSS like they know their first name.

It's too specialized. Just like majoring in "Wireless Networking" is a waste because it's too specialized, majoring in "Web Design" will only teach you one thing. What if a client needs you to outline a participatory design strategy for a web application they are building — without an HCI-background ("but I'm a web design major so I know all there is to know about this stuff!" no you don't) you will not have adequate knowledge to help the client. Talk about being bootstrapped.

In Closing

Wanting to be "the next so and so" will not get you anywhere. Jumping into Flash and trying to be "the next Todd Dominey seems ludicrous doesn't it? Well it's the same way with jumping into CSS and trying to be the next Doug Bowman, it doesn't work like that. Becoming an expert in the medium is one thing, but becoming an expert in the art expressed on that medium is totally different.

Comments

[David Schontzler]

Agreed. I fall into the same category as you. Although, I'd like to think that I (and you) have a decent eye when compared to other techs even if I crumble at the feet of Doug and Todd.

*sigh*

[Aleksandar]

I think that I can place myself into both categories, depending on how much I really spend time designing. Back in primary and high school, I won some nice rewards for classical paintings I did.
At that time, I was drawing and working _each_ day. After I went to study, free time disappeared and I kind of lost my "touch". I can still draw pretty good, but I have a problem with colour combinations and overal feeling that the work gives you.

However, when I do few works in a row, I notice that more I do, I get better and finish the job quicker.

When IT people ask me what I do, I say "web development". When non-IT people ask me what I do, I say "I create internet sites".

[kartooner]

I agree. On that note, I'm more of a designer than I am a web developer or programmer. Sure, I dabble in both and use them, albeit in a hacked form, when the project calls for it, but my background is in design.

Logically speaking, I have a difficult time figuring out how to piece together a PHP, ASP or Cold Fusion application. Whether it be my distaste of Mathematics or my desire to be more creative and less technical, I'm not interested in learning about web applications or utilizing API.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'd much rather construct a magazine layout in QuarkExpress or InDesign, practice sketching or create a landscape painting (my grass roots) than work with variables.

[Johan Svensson]

I have my feet on both sides of the fence. I've been interested in computers since I was six, and have some programming experience. In high school (or whatever the equivalent of our gymnasium is) I studied graphical design for three years.

I'd hardly call myself a professional designer, but I've done some decent stuff, both web design and printed materials. Lately I've been having a "designer's block," though.

LA Times has the typical "information overload" design. They want to push as much information as possible into as little space as possible. And still manage to squeeze a ton of ads in somewhere.

Jakob Nielsen has a book where he analyzes 50 web sites (though it's getting a bit dated now), and breaks them down to show how much of the design is used for ads, navigation, content etc.

Many bigger companies seem to fear whitespace, and instead suffer from information overload. Whitespace increases readability and makes it easier to find what you're looking for.

I try to have as much whitespace as possible when designing -- I'm a minimalist. Broad margins, lots of padding, a few simple colors.

I know a lot of the typical CSS tricks and all that. I'd love to do a collaboration with a real, professional designer some day.

[Matthew Oliphant]

I cannot go straight to Photoshop without trial and error on my trusty paper notebook first. Can you?

I think this question should be Should you?

It is my opinion that better designs arise when one takes pencil to paper first. By jumping in to an application, even if you know that app well, you are limiting yourself with technical constraints.

I think you should come up with the design you want first, then move on to how you can accomplish that design from a technical perspective. Following the tried and ture methodology of write first, edit later.

I am not a web designer (to which Mike can attest). Even though my job title is "interface designer." I consider myself a process designer. I design ways of getting work done. Most often, given then environment in which I work, this manifests itself in the form of a web app. (Wonder Twins powers activate! Shape of a designer! Form of a Web App! Sorry. :P)

But if I considered myself a web designer, I think that would even be more narrowly focused than what I do now. I would rather be thought of as someone who designs solutions not web sites.

I never want to be a web designer. Fake or otherwise.

[Cody Lindley]

I believe the industry is a long way from a majority understanding of the point you are trying to make. Don't get me wrong, it’s a great point but only the tip of the iceberg. The good news is a small amount of employers have figured out that constructing a website is a task for several individuals with different skill sets that overlap to the trained eye only slightly. The bad news is that the majority still believe in the web master to a certain extent. A web master being the all in one designer, programmer, database administrator, and server admin guru. Usually this web master is somehow also a SEO expert, user experience expert, as well as a interaction designer and information architecture designer.

I calm the fury when I see an employer request such an individual. I think to myself, these people need a doctor but don't really care what kind. They need a foot doctor but think a dentist will do. Idiots!

At the end of the day, unless you are lucky enough to work for a savvy employer, we are forced in the web industry to be diversely skilled to the extent of it being a detriment to the profession. We are pioneers in a very young industry and so we suffer the pains of a baby industry.

[Matthew Oliphant]

What companies need to understand is that the "web master" needs to be the CIO, not some MIS grad (if we are lucky) who knows PHP, CSS, etc. and can use Photoshop.

"Web master" needs to turn into something like "web gatekeeper." The person responsible for making sure that design standards are adhered to. Not the person who sets standards, just who validates standards were followed. This would be the last QC check before something goes live.

[Matt]

Pitting me against Doug? Ouch!

I think your argument would be stronger if you highlighted some less-graphics-heavy but very effective designs. There's a lot more to being a designer than Illustrator and Photoshop, like you said. Over-design is worse than no design at all, in my opinion.

[Mike]

Don't worry Matt, you still rock in my opinion. I didn't mean to call you out like that, but when I think of the big blog applications, WP jumps straight into my head (and it was 5 in the morning) :)

After I posted I was thinking more about it, and I think the final sentence of the post is the crux of what I'm trying to say:

You can be an expert in a particular medium of expression, but never master the art of expression. You could be the number one organic chemist in the entire world, and know everything about plants, but might not be able to take care of a garden.

In the same vein, I feel that teaching someone "web design" by teaching them how to be experts in the medium just doesn't work, and that's how it goes at my school. I've taken every "web design" course offered at RIT, and not once did the professor discuss color theory or anything else related to "real design". It just proves that RIT still sucks at a lot of stuff, but I fear that it's a similar situation at other colleges.

[Mike]

I'd like to think so too David. Even though I can't pump out anything that looks like this, I'd love to think I can "hold my own" against other techies like you said.

Tech people unite!

[Scrivs]

What separates really great designers from everyone else is their study of the craft. While most people will look at a site (*cough*in the Vault*cough*) and just say how much they like dropshadows and start using them, the real designer will have an understanding on what makes the dropshadows so effective and the pluses and minuses of using them.

Not too many people run around claiming to be great painters because paintings aren't easy copied, but web designs are and this gives people the impression that just because they have designed something pretty that they know what they are doing.

Great designers can see a design on multiple layers. They see the underlying structure of the site as the foundation and build the pretty stuff on top of it. Bad designers go into Photoshop and use a million filters and then decide to stick some content in there.

In any case the term "web designer" has become so perverted in this community that I don't even say it anymore. Of course I never saw myself as one in the first place.

[Seth Thomas Rasmussen]

Oh gosh, where to begin? :)

First, I agree with you in general to a point. Where that point lies along the line of thought here, I am uncertain.

I can say this right away: there are just as many if not *more* (I'd put hard money on "more") graphic designers who are a disgrace with their markup and code and consider themselves "web designers". That offends me more than your perspective on it, because that side of web development is part of what makes it unique. What sets it apart from its predecessors, especially the annoyingly notable print design.

No, I couldn't do a logo like the Firefox logo right at the moment. But guess what, that's not web design. That's logo design. Logos are then used on the web as part of a web design. Something which spans a whole lot more than pretty pictures and branding. (It should also be noted that the pretty pictures and branding part of web design constitutes well under half the pie of importance, or at least it should.)

I feel like this topic of conversation has been popping up more lately, but it could just be the same old and I could just finally be paying close attention. Either way, the seemingly increased level of discourse on the topic appeared to start right around the time I was starting to form and solidify some of my current opinions about what I think web design is. There is a lot that most of us aren't being taught in our "web design" programs at school. Which leads to another big point of yours that begs addressing.

Web design programs are arguably a waste of time in their current shape, yes, but to propose that a school not start one for this fact is ridiculous. What about simply doing something right that everybody else has fucked up and start a *better* one?

I dunno, but I got pizza in the oven and drums that need bangin'... 'cuz I don't want to work...

[aron]

Johnson & Wales University offers a web design major.

[Stéphane]

I'm quite nothing of a web designer or master, i'm just an IT student (even not in web stuff) who realized that he will never be able to do so beautiful things you mention, and be aware of that is the first step (i think) in the way of making not so looking good but modest, accessible and validate sites ..

No job can be improvised, work is still the key.

[David Schontzler]

I'd like to think so too David. Even though I can't pump out anything that looks like [Doug's cool stuff], I'd love to think I can "hold my own" against other techies like you said.

Yea. I think you know you are stuck somewhere in the middle when techies tell you how nice your layouts are but you are too busy oogling over Doug's latest project and spitting on your own in the process.

[Mike]

I think you know you are stuck somewhere in the middle when techies tell you how nice your layouts are but you are too busy oogling over Doug's latest project and spitting on your own in the process.

Truer words were never spoken ..... I'm definitely in that boat too :)

[Rob Mientjes]

I'm completely graphically minded, and I've been so my whole life. After I got my own pc, it all went with godspeed. I'm now totally into design, but I don't call myself a "web design expert". I'm no Jack-of-all-trades either. I love typography (_nobody_ at school understands my secret passions), accessibility and semantics, but my "mad graphics skillz" lack the spiffiness of Bowman, Dunstan or Dan's work.

But hey, I haven't had my real test yet.

[Paul]

Now, I'm NO web designer, as you can see from my site it's all Dreamweaver, baby, but I think I'm a pretty good designer with a good enough working knowledge of Illustrator and Photoshop to create some pretty pictures. I think that artists can easily transfer to graphic aps., for the most part it's using tools to manipulate pictures, but when it comes to sitting down and hacking out some code, well, that takes a special, very technical, very mathematical person. Most artists need reassurance along the way to create a nice picture, and looking at a screen full of a href div ID doesn't exactly foot the bill. To me it's like apples and oranges. Even though I'm pretty good with dreamweaver the whole FTP ASP XHTML etc. etc. gives me a friggin' Migrane, whereas some people look at code and it gives them a woodrow. I think that every designer should have a "sidekick" code-hack that follows them everywhere and speaks entirely in code. or vice versa.

[Jake Schirm]

I disagree with you on this one Mike. In all professions there can only be a small group that are truly great at what they do, that doesn’t make the others pretenders it just makes them average. If you surf you are still a surfer even if you don’t surf like Kelly Slater or just because Rick Fox isn’t as good as Jordan that doesn’t make him any less a professional basketball player. I think your site looks great, strangely familiar but great. If you design and produce web sites for a living or a hobby just in performing the act you are a web designer, you may not be very good but you can still call yourself a web designer.

One quick note regarding your comments on the time’s site. You can’t pit a content heavy web site like the times’ against vanity sites and bash on its poor use of white space. I am sure when it was designed it looked beautiful, if you build a web site in which the content is changed hourly by hundreds of drones with access to the CMS the details are going to degrade.

[Pete Franceschi]

First let me say great writing, good points, valid argument and - if you have no objections - gonna hyperlink your blog to mine.

Second let me say get the flying hell out of RIT. Yes, you heard me. I started at RIT in 1999 as an IT student, graduated in 2004 (late due to co-op issues) and you know what? Besides the VB classes I took, they didn't teach me a *damn thing*. I taught myself PHP, ASP, I started my own company, I wrote the SQL queries that drove the databases of the sites I created with knowledge I taught myself. RIT is a business concerned with nothing more than taking your dollar. There are some excellent professors (Liz Lawley) there, but you can undoubtedly do better on your own (and im guessing from this blog, you have). That ‘web design’ major is a joke.

Now about that designer thing. As I wrote in my blog post in response to this, what it means to be a 'web designer' in 2004 means nothing in contrast to what it meant in 1995. We, as 'designers', are expected to know practically everything. If it can be done on the web, youd better know how. Unfortunately this logic has spawned programmers with absolutely no artistic side, and graphic artists bumbling through code that makes no sense. This 'happy medium' of knowing a little of everything has truly hurt the industry. We are forced to learn everything about everything. There isnt a 'Javascript' department where I work, and there isnt a graphic artist either. There is no database administrator, and no programming guru. I am all of that, or at least I pretend I am. Why? Because thats what we have to do.

People that refer to themselves as 'web designers' do so out of necesity - because there is no such position as 'Web Graphics Artist' anymore. Like everything else, its been bundled under the umbrella of being a 'designer'. We are both web designer and graphic designer - coder and artisan. For a lucky few there are people dedicated to one or the other, and they are excellent at what they do. For the rest of us who wear all the hats of web development, we get by with what we can, accept what gets thrown our way, and work with what we can to produce the best we can. I, specifically, will never be as good as Mr. Hicks, nor will I ever code like Shaun, but I will know enough about everything to produce what is asked of me by the people that write my checks. And until the industry changes over to a more skill-centered focus (eg. PHP Programmer wanted to specifically code PHP and nothing else) thats what it will mean to be in web design.

And for what it's worth - no, I don't consider myself a web designer.

[I had this huge post ready, but I didn’t want to eat up your blog space – click my link for more]

[Adam Khan]

What's the definition of web design being used here, I wonder. Is it just the raw visuals? Could we be looking at a photoshop dummy of a site?

If not, then web design is different from design because it's not just about how a site looks but how it works. The medium is not a passive one, and the design must also be about that.

And that means that part of web design is interface design and information architecture. Is the web designer (or webmaster, a term disparaged in a comment above) not the person who is supposed to think in terms of his medium in its entirety, like a director in the film medium? You have the cinematographer and the sound designer, but you also have the guy who has worked in various aspects of the medium and is charged with bringing it all into a unified whole.

[Lea]

Pete, your laments are so true! These days, web designers are expected to be super-people with the knowledge and experience of two different industries, and yet are vastly underpaid for their expertise despite having to use completely different skill sets. And on top of that, you're supposed to be an UX and IA expert, too, and be a marketer and business savvy! It's frustrating, but you just have to keep up?

As for me, I really do consider myself a web designer -- because I'm the quintissential person with the formal DESIGN education (Visual Communication Design majoring in Design & Digital Media), who at one point considered being an illustrator or animator in another life, has a pretty hefty PRINT background and experience... but who happened to also be crazily interested in technology and taught myself HTML when I was 15.

When I was 5 on vacation in Hong Kong, the one toy I wanted to buy most in the world was a TOY computer. Yes. At five years old, I was already becoming a tech geek. :) But, I was also very very creatively inclined. When I was growing up people thought I was either going to be a programmer or an animator, if I didn't become a journalist (I was editor my high school newspaper but found I was more interested in making the paper look good than editing/reading/writing haha!)

So when the web design industry was introduced, it was just the perfect opportunity.

Anyway, the confusion comes with the word "design." Some people think of that as a creative endeavour and others technical. Mechanical engineers are sometimes called designers, too! People who know AutoCAD may be called a designer, too. "Designer" seems to be encompassing everyone these days, as is the word "engineer."

I think people should just be content with what services they offer, and not try to beat themselves up over titles and comparing apples to oranges. Yes, in the same industry people bring different skillsets, but that doesn't necessarily make one better or not.

[Charlie]

Hi. I'm Charlie, and I've been fakin' it since 1995.

[Dave]

I agree. A good design school can teach you a lot about design, and make you a better designer. From there you can adjust to the demands of your medium where perfection comes from experience and a good mentor.

But then there is a little wrench thrown in an otherwise perfect machine: the client. As a graphic designer for an engineering firm, I am constantly having to compromise the integrity of my designs to suit the client's wishes.

[Patrick de Klein]

Really interesting article,
I studied software engineering, but were always graphicly minded. I did love the programs which were graphicly attractive, and easy to use. So I also like the nice designs that their are on the web. I almost know every principle their is about webdesign, but I am really not that good at webdesigning. I don't get the point how te design abstract things. I do a fairly decent job at illustrating ( www.kleinwerk.nl ) but those are all real world forms and objects. I don't understand why designing a site, flyer or poster is so much more difficult to me.
I am taking a painting/sketching course in a few weeks. And am hoping that also my abstract designing skills, like layout , form , rythm, colors, space, negative space etc.. will improve.