7 ms·

Fire your designer

38 points by michokest 16y ago

Why do programmers learn new technologies all the time, while designers are stuck in the 90s with their mockups?

wmeredith 16y ago
This is a good article, but the inflammatory title basically guarantees that those who would benefit the most from reading it, designers, are going to be on the defensive going in. And that's if they would even read it at all having come across it online. I spend a lot of time at my job fixing design by designers who don't code, and I'd love for them to read it, but I'm not going to waste my time. (I'm a usability guy/front-end developer who does know how to code and design.)
- nym 16y ago
  Also as a front end developer (who does UX / design), I think I can get about 80% in most situations, but the additional 20% is what makes sites like airbnb stand out so much. In those cases, I'm happy to hire someone and code it myself, after all, I'd much rather they be knock-your-socks-off-good at web design than someone who is only decent at design, and okay at integrating.
  - kls 16y ago
    Right, as a front end shop, we have found that having the two disciplines segmented works very well. We find the best artist we can find and task them with developing a PSD to deliver to the UX team. We get people that are really, really good artist and that is what we want from them a good artistic comp. Trying to force them to cross the bound to writing HTML and CSS that will be used in a complex web application adds additional constraints to finding talented people. In that case we would need an exceptional artist that can write HTML and CSS that is componentized so we can bust it up into widgets, if not we accept sub-par HTML for what we need. It limits the pool of talent. Now conversely if we only require a comp we broaden our pool of truly talented people. Further when we go to look for good browser app UX developers, we don't put the constraint on them of being an exceptional artist. Just finding someone who is versed in Human Factors, HCI and interaction that can produce clean reusable code is hard enough, throw in top 10%er artistic skills and you have really constrained the market. Instead of fighting those market realities we work with them. We hire artist to do art and developers to develop. It works out well because each are exceptional at their core competencies. It also works well because we can hire freelance artist on a per project basis therefore maximizing out investment in art instead of trying to force an artist to do HTML to keep them busy on the pay roll.
scsmith 16y ago
I'm with you on this. I think there should be a closer integration of design and development and not a 'handoff' from one to the other. We have been using the pattern that Ryan Singer discusses in this talk http://thinkvitamin.com/design/ryan-singer-fowa-london-2010/ http://thinkvitamin.com/design/ryan-singer-fowa-london-2010/ It was reassuring to see that 37 signals used the same pattern as us.
DavidPP 16y ago
To me it's seem he put more than one "job" under the designer bucket. To me, an integrator (HTML / front-end JS) an art director, a usubility expert are different roles. Can you find somebody that do all this ? Of course, but if you just hire a "designer" without being more specific about your needs, you will end up in a situation like this.
- pan69 16y ago
  This is where a lot of the problems come from. To many "designers" think that they're also usability experts and information architects. The main problem comes from the fact that those disciplines can be subjective in their nature. A lot of decision making in those roles is about personal "opinion" as in; "Well, I think the search box should sit in the top-left corner of the page". What's easier than stating your opinion? And we all love doing that. A lot of employers simply do not understand this.
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    Actually to few designers do ux and vice versa.
    - pan69 16y ago
      Did you meant to say; Few designers "understand" ux and vica vera?
- haribilalic 16y ago
  Absolutely. If you want top-tier results, you'll have to hire top-tier people and I don't know a single "designer" who's great at every aspect of design and front-end development. It's important to realise that great design is a balancing act between all these aspects and to ensure your team manages them, e.g. a designer designing isolated from the front-end developers. If you're not hiring employees, but are relying on freelancers, I question just how reasonable it is to have a designer use your templating languages and other tools instead of standard ones such as plain HTML and CSS. There are exceptions though: things like Wordpress and jQuery are common enough that you can easily find freelancers who'll be able to use them (but they're not common enough that every freelancer will).
micheljansen 16y ago
Judging from the title I would say that is about the worst advice one could give. I think most if not all problems of this nature stem from the artificial disconnect between design & implementation and the general idea of a designer as a "person who draws nice pictures". If you treat design like this, you get what you pay for (and from what I taste in the article, the term "css monkey" would be more apt). This article from 2009 illustrates nicely what I mean: http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_and_Implementation http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_an...
pan69 16y ago
This is very much a real world problem. It seems that the author of this post has written it out of frustration, hence the title. But in the end, I couldn't agree more. If you are a visual designer and you solely design websites and you can't do HTML/CSS, you have no business being in that role. Period. Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692932 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692932
OSButler 16y ago
Reminds me of a request I got from a webdesigner once, who needed a php backend developer for her projects. Turns out that her work was to design the site in photoshop and then it would have been my turn to put this into HTML & CSS. I still don't know what the php developer requirement had to do with that work and why she needed a developer to do the designer work...
- wccrawford 16y ago
  I had a job lead that wanted an 'expert PHP programmer' and then wanted me to do the same: Slice up PSDs and create well-formed HTML and CSS from it. It was even at a well-respected company. 'Expert programmer' doesn't mean what it used to, apparently.
Neputys 16y ago
A piece of advice for you programming guys so you won't need to waist your time on stuff like this (maybe it's for some "designers" too): Car designer has to work within constrains (materials, engineering, production capabilities, market so on ). He has to understand these things at least a little bit, work them out with colleagues from respective fields. So does web designer, product designer, packaging designer, book designer and so on. This is why they are called designers and not artists (constrains, utilitarian purpose). The term it self means that this person understands aesthetics _plus_ has other knowledge of working in a specific field. So if you hire some guy who can draw a nice face or make a poster to do your interface, sorry but this is your problem. You would be surprised how many designers out there start with wire frames, user interviews and glancing through ux and usability books before they even think about doing anything in PS. @michokest: I have to use teambox on one project now, possibly it's a good thing that you fired yours.
- kls 16y ago
  I think it depends on your process, we do all of our wires we do all of the usability and PWD accessibility up front, once completed we take those wires to an "artist" who makes it pretty add related imagery, color scheme, etc based on those wires. We then receive a PSD comp from the artist that we then slice into the HTML templates. This works well and is an integral part of our process. We are firm believers in letting artist do the art and UX developers do the workflow and arrangements. This process works well for us and allow us to use the best skill sets from each contributor. This way we don't have to rely on "secondary skills" as we call them.
  - Neputys 16y ago
    Is the way things look&feel not a part of usability and especially UX? And how can a designer make it right if he is not familiar with actual problems or requirements? If he does not care, it's his problem but if you don't then you should not blame him for anything. btw, Isn't UX secondary for a developer too?
    - kls 16y ago
doron 16y ago
A point needs to be made that most design software is proprietary software and does not lend itself to version control systems. It would make little difference if you upload a PSD file to git, if there is no real way to parse the changes. Version control systems oriented toward "creative" are very visual and expensive (like alienbrain) primarily due to the fact that the cost of adding proprietary format parsing capability. And you will not be able to convince the vast majority of designers to use Gimp or inkscape. I would say that the web developer community needs to promote use of open formats for design composition, perhaps if we can get rid of AI and PSD as standard compositional formats we will make some progress, it is starting to work with Flash.
- showerst 16y ago
  There are a few free/cheap version control systems out there for PSDs. Pixelnovel timeline is reasonably good, although currently their storage plans are quite small. Adobe's own version cue server (which they annoyingly discontinued) is pretty usable as well. Hopefully the Adobe Drive stuff they've recently rolled out will end up integrated into one of the big (D)VCS's, so we can finally start managing digital assets as easily as code. I don't think that you're ever going to get the dev community to force format changes on Adobe, because the chances or someone really building a solid competitor that you'd need to pass files back and forth from are so low.
zeemonkee 16y ago
So an average web developer is expected to know (for example) PHP|Ruby|Python, one or more frameworks, SQL, one or more RDBMS, linux, bash + sed|awk|grep etc, memcached, nginx, apache, SSL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript + Jquery or other framework, git/hg/svn, a number of algorithms, design patterns and development strategies. And that's not an exhaustive list. A designer is expected to know Photoshop and... ?
- kadavy 16y ago
  You're speaking as if knowing the tool is the only requirement of being a designer. Good designers need to understand concept development, composition, color, and design principles. Additionally, it really helps if they understand product development and marketing, because those are also integral to creating great designs. That said, I'm shocked that it seems to be difficult to find designers who also know HTML/CSS. Designers should definitely know how to use these tools as well.
  - zeemonkee 16y ago
    Good developers should also understand product development and marketing, basic UI principles, and good software design. Obviously you are more than the sum of the tools you use. That said, it's expected of developers that they continually learn new tools or improve their knowledge of existing ones. It seems however the same does not apply to designers.
- lmkg 16y ago
  And an author is only expected to know how to use a pencil (or Word if you want to get fancy). The expertise required of a profession is not quantified by the number of tools it requires, but by the difference in how much value an expert adds vs how much a noob adds. A noob designer will get you something that looks pretty to him or her. A good designer will get you something that gets users excited, tells them what to do, and how to do it, while being accessible to all users, while being extensible, maintainable, and within the constrained imposed by your site structure, CMS, and HTML/CSS/JS. This adds a lot more value than the noob designer, without needing any more tools, just being better at them (although, being familiar enough with your framework to know what's easy and what's hard is useful).
indiejade 16y ago
From the standpoint of a developer who specializes in design, the problem is NOT (as the article states) "the designer doesn't know HTML" vs "the designer only knows HTML". The problem is people (programmers or not) who don't understand how design fits into the process, sequentially. Cases in point are sites like 99designs and crowdSPRING that launch projects for "uncoded" web designs. My solution: http://www.hackeress.com http://www.hackeress.com Yeah, the site is not finished yet. But it relates to this discussion.
- qbert 16y ago
  Please tell me that's meant to be a parody site of bad design and bad code.
sfphotoarts 16y ago
Interesting article, but reading it with the text left aligned with no margin is a very fundamental design flaw that ruined it for me. I'm not being pedantic, but typography and type layout is a fundamental aspect of the user experience.
gallerytungsten 16y ago
This is an entertaining article, as far as programming rants go. But some points were overlooked. Pablo asks, "Seriously, why can’t this person learn HTML? It’s their job to produce results, after all." Ok, fair enough to ask. Here's the answer. As a creative director, art director and designer, I deal extensively with the business case for the project, the marketing, the concept and copy writing, editing, photography, illustration, layout, information design, domain name selection, branding, and several other areas. (There are in fact many people who specialize in just one of the areas I mentioned above; and I’ll note that no one asks these specialists why they don’t know CSS.) Every one of those areas is about “producing results.” Would it be fair or reasonable to ask a programmer to learn all of the above? I don't think so. Beyond the points of fairness and reasonableness is the point that while design is about "how it works," (which is a very deep area I won't delve into at the moment) the issue of "how it looks" is also a major part of it. If the visual appearance doesn’t satisfy the requirements, no amount of CSS expertise will save the day. Furthermore, those who have expertise in making things look good (in addition to the other areas I mentioned above) often have no interest or ability in coding. In fact, they are working in a (primarily) visual discipline because they have a distaste for coding, if they’ve tried it; or simply a total lack of interest. I might point out that print design (in contrast to web design) is completely isolated from involvement with code. When I hit the “print” button, my software will generate the PostScript code for me. In this respect, the tools for print design are far ahead of those for web design. Have you ever opened up a PostScript file? I can assure you, it’s several orders of magnitude more complex than an html/css file. No one would ever ask a designer to edit the PostScript code; such a ludicrous request would be dismissed out of hand. (Although I had to do some PostScript editing many times when I worked in prepress.) Getting back to the Pablo’s question, I have to turn it around and ask: why isn’t there a “visual design” tool with the ease of, say, QuarkXPress, that can output programmer-friendly code? Serious question. While Quark can in fact output html, it’s very bad html. Likewise, one constantly hears complaints about the code generated by Dreamweaver and other tools that offer a modicum of visual editing. There’s clearly a market opportunity for software that can bring the sophistication and ease of use that print designers enjoy to the wide world of web design. (Anyone interested in exploring that market opportunity should contact me.)
gimenete 16y ago
Good article. But it's hard to find a good designer with all those skills.

38 points by michokest 16y ago

Why do programmers learn new technologies all the time, while designers are stuck in the 90s with their mockups?

This is a good article, but the inflammatory title basically guarantees that those who would benefit the most from reading it, designers, are going to be on the defensive going in. And that's if they would even read it at all having come across it online. I spend a lot of time at my job fixing design by designers who don't code, and I'd love for them to read it, but I'm not going to waste my time. (I'm a usability guy/front-end developer who does know how to code and design.)

nym 16y ago
Also as a front end developer (who does UX / design), I think I can get about 80% in most situations, but the additional 20% is what makes sites like airbnb stand out so much. In those cases, I'm happy to hire someone and code it myself, after all, I'd much rather they be knock-your-socks-off-good at web design than someone who is only decent at design, and okay at integrating.
- kls 16y ago
  Right, as a front end shop, we have found that having the two disciplines segmented works very well. We find the best artist we can find and task them with developing a PSD to deliver to the UX team. We get people that are really, really good artist and that is what we want from them a good artistic comp. Trying to force them to cross the bound to writing HTML and CSS that will be used in a complex web application adds additional constraints to finding talented people. In that case we would need an exceptional artist that can write HTML and CSS that is componentized so we can bust it up into widgets, if not we accept sub-par HTML for what we need. It limits the pool of talent. Now conversely if we only require a comp we broaden our pool of truly talented people. Further when we go to look for good browser app UX developers, we don't put the constraint on them of being an exceptional artist. Just finding someone who is versed in Human Factors, HCI and interaction that can produce clean reusable code is hard enough, throw in top 10%er artistic skills and you have really constrained the market. Instead of fighting those market realities we work with them. We hire artist to do art and developers to develop. It works out well because each are exceptional at their core competencies. It also works well because we can hire freelance artist on a per project basis therefore maximizing out investment in art instead of trying to force an artist to do HTML to keep them busy on the pay roll.

scsmith 16y ago

I'm with you on this. I think there should be a closer integration of design and development and not a 'handoff' from one to the other. We have been using the pattern that Ryan Singer discusses in this talk http://thinkvitamin.com/design/ryan-singer-fowa-london-2010/ http://thinkvitamin.com/design/ryan-singer-fowa-london-2010/ It was reassuring to see that 37 signals used the same pattern as us.

DavidPP 16y ago

To me it's seem he put more than one "job" under the designer bucket. To me, an integrator (HTML / front-end JS) an art director, a usubility expert are different roles. Can you find somebody that do all this ? Of course, but if you just hire a "designer" without being more specific about your needs, you will end up in a situation like this.

pan69 16y ago
This is where a lot of the problems come from. To many "designers" think that they're also usability experts and information architects. The main problem comes from the fact that those disciplines can be subjective in their nature. A lot of decision making in those roles is about personal "opinion" as in; "Well, I think the search box should sit in the top-left corner of the page". What's easier than stating your opinion? And we all love doing that. A lot of employers simply do not understand this.
- ThomPete 16y ago
  Actually to few designers do ux and vice versa.
  - pan69 16y ago
    Did you meant to say; Few designers "understand" ux and vica vera?
haribilalic 16y ago
Absolutely. If you want top-tier results, you'll have to hire top-tier people and I don't know a single "designer" who's great at every aspect of design and front-end development. It's important to realise that great design is a balancing act between all these aspects and to ensure your team manages them, e.g. a designer designing isolated from the front-end developers. If you're not hiring employees, but are relying on freelancers, I question just how reasonable it is to have a designer use your templating languages and other tools instead of standard ones such as plain HTML and CSS. There are exceptions though: things like Wordpress and jQuery are common enough that you can easily find freelancers who'll be able to use them (but they're not common enough that every freelancer will).

micheljansen 16y ago

Judging from the title I would say that is about the worst advice one could give. I think most if not all problems of this nature stem from the artificial disconnect between design & implementation and the general idea of a designer as a "person who draws nice pictures". If you treat design like this, you get what you pay for (and from what I taste in the article, the term "css monkey" would be more apt). This article from 2009 illustrates nicely what I mean: http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_and_Implementation http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_an...

pan69 16y ago

This is very much a real world problem. It seems that the author of this post has written it out of frustration, hence the title. But in the end, I couldn't agree more. If you are a visual designer and you solely design websites and you can't do HTML/CSS, you have no business being in that role. Period. Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692932 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692932

OSButler 16y ago

Reminds me of a request I got from a webdesigner once, who needed a php backend developer for her projects. Turns out that her work was to design the site in photoshop and then it would have been my turn to put this into HTML & CSS. I still don't know what the php developer requirement had to do with that work and why she needed a developer to do the designer work...

wccrawford 16y ago
I had a job lead that wanted an 'expert PHP programmer' and then wanted me to do the same: Slice up PSDs and create well-formed HTML and CSS from it. It was even at a well-respected company. 'Expert programmer' doesn't mean what it used to, apparently.

Neputys 16y ago

A piece of advice for you programming guys so you won't need to waist your time on stuff like this (maybe it's for some "designers" too): Car designer has to work within constrains (materials, engineering, production capabilities, market so on ). He has to understand these things at least a little bit, work them out with colleagues from respective fields. So does web designer, product designer, packaging designer, book designer and so on. This is why they are called designers and not artists (constrains, utilitarian purpose). The term it self means that this person understands aesthetics _plus_ has other knowledge of working in a specific field. So if you hire some guy who can draw a nice face or make a poster to do your interface, sorry but this is your problem. You would be surprised how many designers out there start with wire frames, user interviews and glancing through ux and usability books before they even think about doing anything in PS. @michokest: I have to use teambox on one project now, possibly it's a good thing that you fired yours.

kls 16y ago
I think it depends on your process, we do all of our wires we do all of the usability and PWD accessibility up front, once completed we take those wires to an "artist" who makes it pretty add related imagery, color scheme, etc based on those wires. We then receive a PSD comp from the artist that we then slice into the HTML templates. This works well and is an integral part of our process. We are firm believers in letting artist do the art and UX developers do the workflow and arrangements. This process works well for us and allow us to use the best skill sets from each contributor. This way we don't have to rely on "secondary skills" as we call them.
- Neputys 16y ago
  Is the way things look&feel not a part of usability and especially UX? And how can a designer make it right if he is not familiar with actual problems or requirements? If he does not care, it's his problem but if you don't then you should not blame him for anything. btw, Isn't UX secondary for a developer too?
  - kls 16y ago

doron 16y ago

A point needs to be made that most design software is proprietary software and does not lend itself to version control systems. It would make little difference if you upload a PSD file to git, if there is no real way to parse the changes. Version control systems oriented toward "creative" are very visual and expensive (like alienbrain) primarily due to the fact that the cost of adding proprietary format parsing capability. And you will not be able to convince the vast majority of designers to use Gimp or inkscape. I would say that the web developer community needs to promote use of open formats for design composition, perhaps if we can get rid of AI and PSD as standard compositional formats we will make some progress, it is starting to work with Flash.

showerst 16y ago
There are a few free/cheap version control systems out there for PSDs. Pixelnovel timeline is reasonably good, although currently their storage plans are quite small. Adobe's own version cue server (which they annoyingly discontinued) is pretty usable as well. Hopefully the Adobe Drive stuff they've recently rolled out will end up integrated into one of the big (D)VCS's, so we can finally start managing digital assets as easily as code. I don't think that you're ever going to get the dev community to force format changes on Adobe, because the chances or someone really building a solid competitor that you'd need to pass files back and forth from are so low.

zeemonkee 16y ago

So an average web developer is expected to know (for example) PHP|Ruby|Python, one or more frameworks, SQL, one or more RDBMS, linux, bash + sed|awk|grep etc, memcached, nginx, apache, SSL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript + Jquery or other framework, git/hg/svn, a number of algorithms, design patterns and development strategies. And that's not an exhaustive list. A designer is expected to know Photoshop and... ?

kadavy 16y ago
You're speaking as if knowing the tool is the only requirement of being a designer. Good designers need to understand concept development, composition, color, and design principles. Additionally, it really helps if they understand product development and marketing, because those are also integral to creating great designs. That said, I'm shocked that it seems to be difficult to find designers who also know HTML/CSS. Designers should definitely know how to use these tools as well.
- zeemonkee 16y ago
  Good developers should also understand product development and marketing, basic UI principles, and good software design. Obviously you are more than the sum of the tools you use. That said, it's expected of developers that they continually learn new tools or improve their knowledge of existing ones. It seems however the same does not apply to designers.
lmkg 16y ago
And an author is only expected to know how to use a pencil (or Word if you want to get fancy). The expertise required of a profession is not quantified by the number of tools it requires, but by the difference in how much value an expert adds vs how much a noob adds. A noob designer will get you something that looks pretty to him or her. A good designer will get you something that gets users excited, tells them what to do, and how to do it, while being accessible to all users, while being extensible, maintainable, and within the constrained imposed by your site structure, CMS, and HTML/CSS/JS. This adds a lot more value than the noob designer, without needing any more tools, just being better at them (although, being familiar enough with your framework to know what's easy and what's hard is useful).

indiejade 16y ago

From the standpoint of a developer who specializes in design, the problem is NOT (as the article states) "the designer doesn't know HTML" vs "the designer only knows HTML". The problem is people (programmers or not) who don't understand how design fits into the process, sequentially. Cases in point are sites like 99designs and crowdSPRING that launch projects for "uncoded" web designs. My solution: http://www.hackeress.com http://www.hackeress.com Yeah, the site is not finished yet. But it relates to this discussion.

qbert 16y ago
Please tell me that's meant to be a parody site of bad design and bad code.

sfphotoarts 16y ago

Interesting article, but reading it with the text left aligned with no margin is a very fundamental design flaw that ruined it for me. I'm not being pedantic, but typography and type layout is a fundamental aspect of the user experience.

gallerytungsten 16y ago

This is an entertaining article, as far as programming rants go. But some points were overlooked. Pablo asks, "Seriously, why can’t this person learn HTML? It’s their job to produce results, after all." Ok, fair enough to ask. Here's the answer. As a creative director, art director and designer, I deal extensively with the business case for the project, the marketing, the concept and copy writing, editing, photography, illustration, layout, information design, domain name selection, branding, and several other areas. (There are in fact many people who specialize in just one of the areas I mentioned above; and I’ll note that no one asks these specialists why they don’t know CSS.) Every one of those areas is about “producing results.” Would it be fair or reasonable to ask a programmer to learn all of the above? I don't think so. Beyond the points of fairness and reasonableness is the point that while design is about "how it works," (which is a very deep area I won't delve into at the moment) the issue of "how it looks" is also a major part of it. If the visual appearance doesn’t satisfy the requirements, no amount of CSS expertise will save the day. Furthermore, those who have expertise in making things look good (in addition to the other areas I mentioned above) often have no interest or ability in coding. In fact, they are working in a (primarily) visual discipline because they have a distaste for coding, if they’ve tried it; or simply a total lack of interest. I might point out that print design (in contrast to web design) is completely isolated from involvement with code. When I hit the “print” button, my software will generate the PostScript code for me. In this respect, the tools for print design are far ahead of those for web design. Have you ever opened up a PostScript file? I can assure you, it’s several orders of magnitude more complex than an html/css file. No one would ever ask a designer to edit the PostScript code; such a ludicrous request would be dismissed out of hand. (Although I had to do some PostScript editing many times when I worked in prepress.) Getting back to the Pablo’s question, I have to turn it around and ask: why isn’t there a “visual design” tool with the ease of, say, QuarkXPress, that can output programmer-friendly code? Serious question. While Quark can in fact output html, it’s very bad html. Likewise, one constantly hears complaints about the code generated by Dreamweaver and other tools that offer a modicum of visual editing. There’s clearly a market opportunity for software that can bring the sophistication and ease of use that print designers enjoy to the wide world of web design. (Anyone interested in exploring that market opportunity should contact me.)

gimenete 16y ago

Good article. But it's hard to find a good designer with all those skills.