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Some 'pure' design jobs may be drying up but there is plenty of work in the front-end developer space. When work becomes thin designers should focus on Sharpeni

Some 'pure' design jobs may be drying up but there is plenty of work in the front-end developer space. When work becomes thin designers should focus on Sharpening their JS skills and they will find plenty of work. When someone is bemoaning the lack of work available I suspect the real problem is their inflexibility or technical stagnation. This is especially apparent when a novice roped in from the mail room can out-compete them and eat their lunch. The problem is the designer's skillset, not the industry trend. The following anecdote is from my perspective as a Sr. Programmer. I've worked with many great designers over the last 10 years and this is an example of my worst experience working with a 'pure' one. About 4 years ago I once worked with a designer who refused to break up a 60 meg psd file into separate elements I could use for buttons/background etc. I don't even have Photoshop. Her argument was she didn't know which layers/elements should be separated. She gave this to me the day before I had to have the site in prod. So I fired up gimp saw that it had 500 layers and just exported it to a jpg and used javascript imagemaps for the buttons just to get it out in time. This is after a week of work on another site they changed their mind on. I ultimately didn't get paid for any of my work and it was the last time I freelanced. Primadonnas who do not put in any effort into learning basic technical skills to maximize their effectiveness can take a hike. I've worked with great designers who were excited about the technical aspects of their craft. They understood that knowing what's possible makes them a better designer. Even when their graphic design degree did not provide them with any CSS training they quickly adapted because nobody has time to pass something back and forth moving elements around a few pixels at a time. I've seen more than one end up as great front end programmers and UX/UI designers. Even the ones who never quite got JS but embraced CSS were a great resource to have and made our sites look great. These are the kinds of people who make projects fun. If jobs for people who consider CSS "beneath them" are drying up I say good riddance. Nobody has time for the overhead entailed from having programmers move elements around back and forth a few pixels at a time to please the designer who can't be bothered to learn valuable skills of their own trade. The rule in technology has always been "Adapt or Perish" nobody bemoans the loss of COBOL jobs today for the same reasons people don't know what a "Printer's devil" is.

zaphar 11y ago
Nowhere in that article was there any indication that the web designers were people who considered CSS "beneath them". 4 years ago you had a bad experience and now you are projecting it onto an article that is only related due to the use of one word, "designer". The article was about a move to in-house design instead of agency/freelancer work.
- gnarbarian 11y ago
  I clarified my comment a bit. The type of designer from my anecdote is becoming less and less common while simultaneously there is far more front end work available and designers who are willing to step up to the task. So when someone is bemoaning the lack of work available I suspect the real problem is their inflexibility or technical stagnation. This is especially apparent when a novice roped in from the mail room can out-compete them and eat their lunch. The problem is the designer's skillset, not the industry trend.
flomo 11y ago
Agree with your gist completely. I’ve worked in the agency world, and there’s loads of “designers” out there who come primarily from a print background and only have a vague clue how the web medium actually functions. They often try to do something unique or interesting, but the result ends up just being weird or not at all best-practice. (“Lets put the menus on the bottom of the page. Eureka!”) Plus, the client ends up with a website that was designed to be printed out on 8.5x11 sheets of paper. I’m sure a lot of companies have gone through this experience and decided it was a massive ripoff compared to buying a $15 wordpress template and hiring a freelancer to update the content. Of course, I’ve worked with many incredible web designers as well, and it’s definitely worth it for major brands to have a good design team. But that whole middle-lower-end market is probably just disappearing.
- gnarbarian 11y ago
  That is definitely the most aggravating thing from both a user and developer perspective. Naive people pushing kitschy ideas caused us to have 100% flash, unlinkable and unindexable websites for quite a while and didn't really get eliminated until mobile killed flash and HTML5 CSS and JS caught up to all the glitzy crap. And we still see people trying to 'fix' the expected behavior of things like the scrollbar. Stuff like that is a huge waste of time on something that actually hurts the user experience and almost always breaks mobile or cross browser compatibility. Many of these people have the wrong goal entirely because they think visually standing out is the most important thing. In print that makes sense, because you're trying to capture their attention while they desperately try to ignore your advertisement. On a website you already have their attention because they came to your website. And here's the Key, they came to your website to accomplish something, the designer ought to be trying to help the user reach that goal as effortlessly as possible. It's a bad idea for login links and fields to be anywhere but the top right. You put the cash registers near the exit of your store, Hiding them is a bad idea. Other funny analogies: Why put those boring gender signs on the bathrooms doesn't everyone do that? It clutters up the doors and doesn't fit with our minimalist design language. Also, if we do that then they won't look like any of the other doors in our store. We want our customers to feel like they can share everything with us so we removed all the bathroom doors and partitions between toilets. It'll even save you material costs! Wheelchair access ramps are ugly, we don't need them. I think an escalator should speed up and slow down depending on how fast someone is walking up. (scrollbar overrides) I think having signs that announce the products in a particular isle makes the store too cluttered and busy, If we make them wander around aimlessly for the product they are looking for they will see more of our store and end up buying things they otherwise wouldn't have. Just to clarify, I think standing out is great but not when it comes at the cost of usability.

zaphar 11y ago

Nowhere in that article was there any indication that the web designers were people who considered CSS "beneath them". 4 years ago you had a bad experience and now you are projecting it onto an article that is only related due to the use of one word, "designer". The article was about a move to in-house design instead of agency/freelancer work.

gnarbarian 11y ago
I clarified my comment a bit. The type of designer from my anecdote is becoming less and less common while simultaneously there is far more front end work available and designers who are willing to step up to the task. So when someone is bemoaning the lack of work available I suspect the real problem is their inflexibility or technical stagnation. This is especially apparent when a novice roped in from the mail room can out-compete them and eat their lunch. The problem is the designer's skillset, not the industry trend.

flomo 11y ago

Agree with your gist completely. I’ve worked in the agency world, and there’s loads of “designers” out there who come primarily from a print background and only have a vague clue how the web medium actually functions. They often try to do something unique or interesting, but the result ends up just being weird or not at all best-practice. (“Lets put the menus on the bottom of the page. Eureka!”) Plus, the client ends up with a website that was designed to be printed out on 8.5x11 sheets of paper. I’m sure a lot of companies have gone through this experience and decided it was a massive ripoff compared to buying a $15 wordpress template and hiring a freelancer to update the content. Of course, I’ve worked with many incredible web designers as well, and it’s definitely worth it for major brands to have a good design team. But that whole middle-lower-end market is probably just disappearing.

gnarbarian 11y ago
That is definitely the most aggravating thing from both a user and developer perspective. Naive people pushing kitschy ideas caused us to have 100% flash, unlinkable and unindexable websites for quite a while and didn't really get eliminated until mobile killed flash and HTML5 CSS and JS caught up to all the glitzy crap. And we still see people trying to 'fix' the expected behavior of things like the scrollbar. Stuff like that is a huge waste of time on something that actually hurts the user experience and almost always breaks mobile or cross browser compatibility. Many of these people have the wrong goal entirely because they think visually standing out is the most important thing. In print that makes sense, because you're trying to capture their attention while they desperately try to ignore your advertisement. On a website you already have their attention because they came to your website. And here's the Key, they came to your website to accomplish something, the designer ought to be trying to help the user reach that goal as effortlessly as possible. It's a bad idea for login links and fields to be anywhere but the top right. You put the cash registers near the exit of your store, Hiding them is a bad idea. Other funny analogies: Why put those boring gender signs on the bathrooms doesn't everyone do that? It clutters up the doors and doesn't fit with our minimalist design language. Also, if we do that then they won't look like any of the other doors in our store. We want our customers to feel like they can share everything with us so we removed all the bathroom doors and partitions between toilets. It'll even save you material costs! Wheelchair access ramps are ugly, we don't need them. I think an escalator should speed up and slow down depending on how fast someone is walking up. (scrollbar overrides) I think having signs that announce the products in a particular isle makes the store too cluttered and busy, If we make them wander around aimlessly for the product they are looking for they will see more of our store and end up buying things they otherwise wouldn't have. Just to clarify, I think standing out is great but not when it comes at the cost of usability.