10 ms·

It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks

34 points by interpol_p 3y ago

ajkjk 3y ago
This perspective that design is a feminine job must seem true from a certain lived experience, but... it must not be universally true because it seems pretty obviously false from other experiences.
000ooo000 3y ago
>Also, I considered titling this "How the men folk ruined web design" Ctrl+w
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  She said "hear me out", so I decided to give it a go, despite articles starting this way never being anything but a weird rant where the author assumes their personal experience is reflective of society as a whole ('main character syndrome'). This one did not disappoint. The field of web design hasn't been recategorised due to it being gendered - in fact most web designers pre-2010 were men - it got refactored due to variances in how we see frontend and shortcuts to profit (capitalism). It is now a lot more profitable to run a single or small sized team doing full stack and use templating, the various scaffolds of tailwind, bootstrap, etc or simply outsource the design elements, which are often a one time thing. Modern dev allows frontend and backend to be built in the same languages, abstracts heavily and often provides all the infrastucture too. Web designers are broadly a dead category due to this, as are sysadmins, backend devs and frontend devs (all predominently male areas).
- DangitBobby 3y ago
  It doesn't get any better. I was too annoyed with how many times in such a short article she managed to blame men for everything to do a thorough reading, but I was at least expecting to see some summary of great design elements we are all missing out on because of the focus on "frontend" over "web design".
  - maegul 3y ago
    I just came out of reading the article surprised at how little it had to do with gender. The point is there, and reasonably made IMO, but the article is mainly about the culture of front end dev. Honestly, I ponder whether reacting to the mention of gender as harshly as this is remotely healthy or even logical.
    - DangitBobby 3y ago
      The blame game is exhausting, inflammatory (often intentionally and this case is no exception), and I wish I could say played out but I don't think we are there yet.
    - 000ooo000 3y ago
      Reasonably made? >And, the boys in the industry at this time made it known that we were not "real" developers. >the gendering of design as women's work is why people don't use the title "web designer" anymore. It's been belittled and othered away. >Well, the area of front-end work, which has been heavily gendered as "feminine" work, was finally being viewed as "serious" or "real" programming because, to no one's surprise, something that is designed well is good for business. As a "real" career option for developers, now men are interested. You're welcome. >Sorry, building websites is for us serious manly man engineers now who can do very difficult things like making the computers go beep boop. >Since the "design" piece of web design is still viewed as a feminine role, that part of being a web designer was largely cut off from the front-end development role, now that men were all in on that role. You are going to tell me that this person has any kind of numbers or studies to back any of this up? Show me something solid that says the majority male devs view web design as women's work. Until then it's just a rant.
      - tipiirai 3y ago
        The most recent HN gender poll made just few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38031363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38031363 95% male.
- maegul 3y ago
  You forgot the next clauses that are a tad fairer than that: > and just hear me out, I am going to explain that.
  - DangitBobby 3y ago
    If you've got got a take, the people you're flaming don't have an obligation to hear you out.
swayvil 3y ago
I never knew that web design and gender were so intertwined. Color me informed.
- upupupandaway 3y ago
  They aren't. This article is a basket of contempt against different targets (men, SDEs, the weather) and makes little sense. The reason why stand-alone web designers "ceased to exist" (they haven't) is because of the proliferation of out-of-the-box front-end frameworks that allow anyone to build a reasonably good site using polished building blocks. edit: typo
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  There's some interesting history around the gendered history of computing: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25147356 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25147356 Ballistics computing was obviously done by women as the men were drafted & overseas, but all paid at 'subprofessional rates'. Another good history at https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/sections/research/how-computing-became-masculine-in-the-cold-war https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/sections/research/how-co... There are definitely some parallels between OP's article and the history of computing.
23B1 3y ago
This article is the first time in 20 years of doing this that I've ever heard of UX/design work referred to as "feminine"
dangus 3y ago
Back in the day the web designer did everything including the artistic parts of building a website. Nowadays, most companies building websites have split the responsibilities into multiple roles. Frontend Engineers aren’t called “web designers” because that’s not what they do. A UX Designer and graphic designer decided how a button should look and feel, and the frontend engineer is the one who implements the functionality in code. They literally are not designers. The article acknowledges the splitting of the roles but doesn’t explain why this is supposed to be a bad thing. It’s pretty obvious why the split took place: because websites are more complex and standards are higher (unless you think the space jam website is the pinnacle of web design).
- interpol_p 3y ago
  You’re totally right that there is now more complexity, especially around tooling and deployment. We have pipelines now, Docker containers, things that just aren’t simple and direct like a plain HTML+CSS website However in my experience the best “front-end engineers” are designers. One of the best I’ve ever worked with called himself “Devsigner.” He was a passionate Android developer who knew the platform conventions better than the designers did, he was able to identify tiny flaws in designs (incorrect font weights, inconsistent padding, adherence to platform conventions), as well as larger flaws in the UX, for example, how to consistently and intuitively navigate between screens, when and where to place navigation elements, etc Development wise, he was able to devise the app architecture clearly. Write end-to-end mock servers to perform UI testing, build the dev ops pipeline, manage app releases, and implement the UI using best practices I am the same sort of designer/developer, and I expect that many people are capable of doing both things like this. They just need the opportunity and positive feedback to get there Websites are more complex, but I expect people to be capable of learning complex things and to be aware of, and apply, design principles
cmdli 3y ago
I went into this hoping that it would go more into how web design sucks now, hopefully with more specific critiques. I understand that the typical "web designer that builds entire websites" role is mostly gone now, but how has that actually affected development? Is it any different from other products, where Product Design and Product Development are also different roles? I've encountered plenty of UI developers that have very little visual design sense and are mostly fine, and I've encounter plenty of UI designers that don't know the intricacies of the front-end. Sure, sometimes those two have to hash things out, but that hasn't seemed to have been a large blocker in my experience; just part of the process.
spzb 3y ago
Curious take. I mean, I've been building websites since the late 1990s and I agree that there are very few people working today who understand the whole stack but that's because it is more complicated now. But it's a big leap to suggest that that's down to sexism (and I'm not denying that sexism in tech is a real problem). I'm not at all convinced that "front end developer" and "web designer" are the same job. They both still exist as separate roles. Some people can do both, same as some people do frontend and backend web dev. But they're not the same role.
Jensson 3y ago
> What happened around that time, in 2010 or so, that I mentioned? Well, the area of front-end work, which has been heavily gendered as "feminine" work, was finally being viewed as "serious" or "real" programming* because, to no one's surprise, something that is designed well is good for business. I disagree, what happened was that javascript got fast and now everyone wanted web apps instead of web pages. Web designers makes web pages, documents with little javascript. Web developers makes web apps with huge amounts of javascript. They are two very different roles, it makes sense to have different job titles for them.
- upupupandaway 3y ago
  Bootstrap launched, that is what happened.
- tipiirai 3y ago
  But we still have web pages and someone needs to design them. I think the question of why the term "Web designer" is no longer used is a legit one.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Because the web developers added so many build steps to the process that a dedicated web designer can no longer add pages and tie them together on their own without also being a web developer. Then why call people who can do both developers? Because developers are paid more than designers, so people who can do both prefer the developer title. This means that there is no longer anyone who is called web designer.
    - tipiirai 3y ago
      > Because the web developers added so many build steps Haha. I'm afraid you are right.
- golergka 3y ago
  This. I make web apps. This means that I have to know about Docker and Kubernetes (because our deployment is complex), protocol buffers (because our services talk to one another), Kafka (because they talk asynchronously), parsing abstract syntax trees (because apps that I do are IDEs), git and its internals and filesystems (not only to work on our source code, but because our apps actually launch some git commands behind the scenes), SQL and quirks of different OLTP and OLAP databases, Rust, Python, Go and other programming languages, WebGL and other 3d rendering topics like writing shaders and projection matrices, processing RTL texts, emojis and all other wonderful aspects of unicode (including utf16 surrogate pairs), HTTP protocol, TCP, UDP and websockets... You know what I would do without? Keeping up to date with Photoshop, Illustrator and color circles. I'm still doing a lot of UX decisions, of course. But for the love of god, just give me sensible defaults and component library.
Terr_ 3y ago
> the gendering of design as women's work WTF? This is the literally first time I've heard someone describe web-design as "women's work." I find myself worrying that it's the opening move of some sort of "damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't" scenario from the author, e.g.: "Oh, so it's men's work!? How sexist!"
- szszrk 3y ago
  Same here. Actually back in 2000-2010 men I knew were very interested in modern webdesign with modern html code underneath. A lot of fun things (wars even) in browser-land happened back then. While I believe every word of that article I still think it's a very personal view of a very personal situation. Were I lived girls were just <5% of IT in university and while they actually had great grades and only half of them dropped out/resigned (it was 3/4 dropouts for guys ;/) I know only two that wanted to stay in the field. One was actually a dropout as well, but switched to construction engineering and is a doctor in that field. Other one was always a Linux enthusiast and became a somewhat known security researcher. That's 2 out of over 400.
lifthrasiir 3y ago
I agree that the modern web design greatly suffered from lacking actual "designers", but don't think it's purely a gender issue (I mean, this field does have an overwhelmingly huge gender issue but also some more). I can say this because I actually worked with web designers as late as in 2020, and it was quite hard to communicate what is needed for modularized UIs. Probably designers see the whole picture while programmers like me see individual components---no one is incorrect, but you'd need a good way to reconcile them. Without such reconcilation, programmers tend to take designers' job away because they at least can make a working app by themselves.
- threatofrain 3y ago
  Do we even know if the design industry is shrinking YoY?
readthenotes1 3y ago
So are the blinking banners owned by the women web designers?
dasil003 3y ago
This is awkward. I get that there's sexism in tech, no argument there. But it's just not true that web design was sprung from whole cloth as a new discipline and then later became gendered at women coders' expense. I was there in the 90s, and designers were already there, and yes there was already gender bias. The thing was, the bulk of designers in the 90s used PageMaker/InDesign/Illustrator and it took a while for that discipline to converge with HCI and UI design. These things sort of converged in the web world later, and yes there was gender bias, but that bias existed historically. Furthermore, if you go further back, before my time, there was much greater representation of women in programming and "making computers go beep boop" which had steadily declined over many decades. I won't presume to analyze the root causes of gender bias in tech, but it's just lazy thinking to blame the decline of the hybrid designer/coder as being due to sexism and "role gendering". The more obvious answer is that the depth of expertise needed for modern UX design and front-end development grew by a lot, and hence the generic "web designer" role disappeared in favor of greater specialization. Blaming this on the patriarchy might get you sympathy and clicks in the current zeitgest, but it doesn't really say antyhing about causality or what's actually going on.
interpol_p 3y ago
I posted this not because I thought it would be inflammatory, but because I very much agreed with the point that design is not as far “to the left” as it should be I started out as an animator/designer, and then became a developer. I became a developer because I wanted to write plugins for the 3D modelling software I used. Over the decades I have become extremely jaded at how companies I have worked for organise into “UX Design” and “Development” teams. It is utter nonsense Everyone I have worked with, once trained, is capable of doing both — perhaps not everyone tackles design or development with the same passion, but teams who have comfort with both areas of app/web design and development often produce superior products Now I am in a position to build a team at a company that is divided into “UX” and “Development.” I hope to ask people on the design team to install Xcode and Android Studio, to get comfortable making quick prototypes in Compose and SwiftUI, to update asset catalogues and colours, and to make branches and commit changes. Designers are genuinely excited about this Similarly, I have started giving developers edit access to Figma, helping them produce design and visually communicate on a Figma board, tweak and suggest designs, and even build parts that can be approved by people on the “design team.” Developers have no problem doing this I am hoping that the lines between “designer” and “developer” dissolve and we simply have coordinated teams, with talented people able to direct the vision for both aspects of a product In my personal side projects everyone is treated as both designer and developer, no one “blindly implements” design (which I have experienced at many large companies) and no one creates design without understanding the nuances of the platform. This results in much less back-and-forth, and products that ship with more consistent UI design
mediumsmart 3y ago
A web designer, whatever her gender, is a dude who makes websites, including the design. The programmers finally were able to do that too when frameworks aka bootstrap did the design for them. That’s why all corporate websites look the same and nowadays the self employed genders can get design and programming from the WordPress so the majority of their sites looks like that too or they can hire someone who can’t program or design but knows how to put the text and the images into WordPress or joomla and if the favicon of the result is custom they are above average. Real web designers are incredibly rare and they don’t do tutorials. Even Rachel Andrews or Jen Simmons, who are great web designers don’t fully qualify. Designing and typing into a computer are just too far apart. All tutorials are from YouTube professionals and they always include a framework because web developers can’t do design, they ‘build’ websites from components. And here’s the thing, the dev parts of a site can be formalized (thank you thank you thank you Andy) while the design aspect cannot. So designers can now do real web design, web developers can disassociate their opinions from their employer, Andy can give awesome key notes and companies can hire companies to get their flavor of bootreact on rails or whathaveyou. All webdev sucks but Webdesign for the small web sucks less.
- tipiirai 3y ago
  > is a dude who makes websites "dude": a man; a guy (from Oxford Languages)
  - intvocoder 3y ago
    Personally, I subscribe to the inclusive, Good Burger, definition of dude. I’m a dude, he’s a dude, she’s a dude, ‘cause we’re all dudes, hey.
    - tipiirai 3y ago
      I'm with you Bro!
wryoak 3y ago
> gendering of web design YMMV but personally, while I've met both male and female developers of all stripes and strats, I’ve only met male web designers, so this thesis doesn’t resonate strongly with me.
dzek69 3y ago
I've never heard that web design is a "femine" work. Anyone knows where the author lives? So different culture
jacknews 3y ago
"I don't know how else to answer this, besides: the gendering of design as women's work is why people don't use the title "web designer" anymore." Yeah ... nope. The reason for the split (and I think it started earlier) is that front-end development changed from being a bit of HTML, CSS and a smattering of JS or PHP, to real actual structured, architected programming with complex frameworks etc. Web design similarly become something much more professional, and more aligned with design in other fields. Therefore 'web design' carried an air of amateurism, and was no longer fashionable versus simply 'design'.

34 points by interpol_p 3y ago

This perspective that design is a feminine job must seem true from a certain lived experience, but... it must not be universally true because it seems pretty obviously false from other experiences.

000ooo000 3y ago

>Also, I considered titling this "How the men folk ruined web design" Ctrl+w

averageRoyalty 3y ago
She said "hear me out", so I decided to give it a go, despite articles starting this way never being anything but a weird rant where the author assumes their personal experience is reflective of society as a whole ('main character syndrome'). This one did not disappoint. The field of web design hasn't been recategorised due to it being gendered - in fact most web designers pre-2010 were men - it got refactored due to variances in how we see frontend and shortcuts to profit (capitalism). It is now a lot more profitable to run a single or small sized team doing full stack and use templating, the various scaffolds of tailwind, bootstrap, etc or simply outsource the design elements, which are often a one time thing. Modern dev allows frontend and backend to be built in the same languages, abstracts heavily and often provides all the infrastucture too. Web designers are broadly a dead category due to this, as are sysadmins, backend devs and frontend devs (all predominently male areas).
DangitBobby 3y ago
It doesn't get any better. I was too annoyed with how many times in such a short article she managed to blame men for everything to do a thorough reading, but I was at least expecting to see some summary of great design elements we are all missing out on because of the focus on "frontend" over "web design".
- maegul 3y ago
  I just came out of reading the article surprised at how little it had to do with gender. The point is there, and reasonably made IMO, but the article is mainly about the culture of front end dev. Honestly, I ponder whether reacting to the mention of gender as harshly as this is remotely healthy or even logical.
  - DangitBobby 3y ago
    The blame game is exhausting, inflammatory (often intentionally and this case is no exception), and I wish I could say played out but I don't think we are there yet.
  - 000ooo000 3y ago
    Reasonably made? >And, the boys in the industry at this time made it known that we were not "real" developers. >the gendering of design as women's work is why people don't use the title "web designer" anymore. It's been belittled and othered away. >Well, the area of front-end work, which has been heavily gendered as "feminine" work, was finally being viewed as "serious" or "real" programming because, to no one's surprise, something that is designed well is good for business. As a "real" career option for developers, now men are interested. You're welcome. >Sorry, building websites is for us serious manly man engineers now who can do very difficult things like making the computers go beep boop. >Since the "design" piece of web design is still viewed as a feminine role, that part of being a web designer was largely cut off from the front-end development role, now that men were all in on that role. You are going to tell me that this person has any kind of numbers or studies to back any of this up? Show me something solid that says the majority male devs view web design as women's work. Until then it's just a rant.
    - tipiirai 3y ago
      The most recent HN gender poll made just few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38031363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38031363 95% male.
maegul 3y ago
You forgot the next clauses that are a tad fairer than that: > and just hear me out, I am going to explain that.
- DangitBobby 3y ago
  If you've got got a take, the people you're flaming don't have an obligation to hear you out.

swayvil 3y ago

I never knew that web design and gender were so intertwined. Color me informed.

upupupandaway 3y ago
They aren't. This article is a basket of contempt against different targets (men, SDEs, the weather) and makes little sense. The reason why stand-alone web designers "ceased to exist" (they haven't) is because of the proliferation of out-of-the-box front-end frameworks that allow anyone to build a reasonably good site using polished building blocks. edit: typo
a_bonobo 3y ago
There's some interesting history around the gendered history of computing: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25147356 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25147356 Ballistics computing was obviously done by women as the men were drafted & overseas, but all paid at 'subprofessional rates'. Another good history at https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/sections/research/how-computing-became-masculine-in-the-cold-war https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/sections/research/how-co... There are definitely some parallels between OP's article and the history of computing.

23B1 3y ago

This article is the first time in 20 years of doing this that I've ever heard of UX/design work referred to as "feminine"

dangus 3y ago

Back in the day the web designer did everything including the artistic parts of building a website. Nowadays, most companies building websites have split the responsibilities into multiple roles. Frontend Engineers aren’t called “web designers” because that’s not what they do. A UX Designer and graphic designer decided how a button should look and feel, and the frontend engineer is the one who implements the functionality in code. They literally are not designers. The article acknowledges the splitting of the roles but doesn’t explain why this is supposed to be a bad thing. It’s pretty obvious why the split took place: because websites are more complex and standards are higher (unless you think the space jam website is the pinnacle of web design).

interpol_p 3y ago
You’re totally right that there is now more complexity, especially around tooling and deployment. We have pipelines now, Docker containers, things that just aren’t simple and direct like a plain HTML+CSS website However in my experience the best “front-end engineers” are designers. One of the best I’ve ever worked with called himself “Devsigner.” He was a passionate Android developer who knew the platform conventions better than the designers did, he was able to identify tiny flaws in designs (incorrect font weights, inconsistent padding, adherence to platform conventions), as well as larger flaws in the UX, for example, how to consistently and intuitively navigate between screens, when and where to place navigation elements, etc Development wise, he was able to devise the app architecture clearly. Write end-to-end mock servers to perform UI testing, build the dev ops pipeline, manage app releases, and implement the UI using best practices I am the same sort of designer/developer, and I expect that many people are capable of doing both things like this. They just need the opportunity and positive feedback to get there Websites are more complex, but I expect people to be capable of learning complex things and to be aware of, and apply, design principles

cmdli 3y ago

I went into this hoping that it would go more into how web design sucks now, hopefully with more specific critiques. I understand that the typical "web designer that builds entire websites" role is mostly gone now, but how has that actually affected development? Is it any different from other products, where Product Design and Product Development are also different roles? I've encountered plenty of UI developers that have very little visual design sense and are mostly fine, and I've encounter plenty of UI designers that don't know the intricacies of the front-end. Sure, sometimes those two have to hash things out, but that hasn't seemed to have been a large blocker in my experience; just part of the process.

spzb 3y ago

Curious take. I mean, I've been building websites since the late 1990s and I agree that there are very few people working today who understand the whole stack but that's because it is more complicated now. But it's a big leap to suggest that that's down to sexism (and I'm not denying that sexism in tech is a real problem). I'm not at all convinced that "front end developer" and "web designer" are the same job. They both still exist as separate roles. Some people can do both, same as some people do frontend and backend web dev. But they're not the same role.

Jensson 3y ago

> What happened around that time, in 2010 or so, that I mentioned? Well, the area of front-end work, which has been heavily gendered as "feminine" work, was finally being viewed as "serious" or "real" programming* because, to no one's surprise, something that is designed well is good for business. I disagree, what happened was that javascript got fast and now everyone wanted web apps instead of web pages. Web designers makes web pages, documents with little javascript. Web developers makes web apps with huge amounts of javascript. They are two very different roles, it makes sense to have different job titles for them.

upupupandaway 3y ago
Bootstrap launched, that is what happened.
tipiirai 3y ago
But we still have web pages and someone needs to design them. I think the question of why the term "Web designer" is no longer used is a legit one.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Because the web developers added so many build steps to the process that a dedicated web designer can no longer add pages and tie them together on their own without also being a web developer. Then why call people who can do both developers? Because developers are paid more than designers, so people who can do both prefer the developer title. This means that there is no longer anyone who is called web designer.
  - tipiirai 3y ago
    > Because the web developers added so many build steps Haha. I'm afraid you are right.
golergka 3y ago
This. I make web apps. This means that I have to know about Docker and Kubernetes (because our deployment is complex), protocol buffers (because our services talk to one another), Kafka (because they talk asynchronously), parsing abstract syntax trees (because apps that I do are IDEs), git and its internals and filesystems (not only to work on our source code, but because our apps actually launch some git commands behind the scenes), SQL and quirks of different OLTP and OLAP databases, Rust, Python, Go and other programming languages, WebGL and other 3d rendering topics like writing shaders and projection matrices, processing RTL texts, emojis and all other wonderful aspects of unicode (including utf16 surrogate pairs), HTTP protocol, TCP, UDP and websockets... You know what I would do without? Keeping up to date with Photoshop, Illustrator and color circles. I'm still doing a lot of UX decisions, of course. But for the love of god, just give me sensible defaults and component library.

Terr_ 3y ago

> the gendering of design as women's work WTF? This is the literally first time I've heard someone describe web-design as "women's work." I find myself worrying that it's the opening move of some sort of "damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't" scenario from the author, e.g.: "Oh, so it's men's work!? How sexist!"

szszrk 3y ago
Same here. Actually back in 2000-2010 men I knew were very interested in modern webdesign with modern html code underneath. A lot of fun things (wars even) in browser-land happened back then. While I believe every word of that article I still think it's a very personal view of a very personal situation. Were I lived girls were just <5% of IT in university and while they actually had great grades and only half of them dropped out/resigned (it was 3/4 dropouts for guys ;/) I know only two that wanted to stay in the field. One was actually a dropout as well, but switched to construction engineering and is a doctor in that field. Other one was always a Linux enthusiast and became a somewhat known security researcher. That's 2 out of over 400.

lifthrasiir 3y ago

I agree that the modern web design greatly suffered from lacking actual "designers", but don't think it's purely a gender issue (I mean, this field does have an overwhelmingly huge gender issue but also some more). I can say this because I actually worked with web designers as late as in 2020, and it was quite hard to communicate what is needed for modularized UIs. Probably designers see the whole picture while programmers like me see individual components---no one is incorrect, but you'd need a good way to reconcile them. Without such reconcilation, programmers tend to take designers' job away because they at least can make a working app by themselves.

threatofrain 3y ago
Do we even know if the design industry is shrinking YoY?

readthenotes1 3y ago

So are the blinking banners owned by the women web designers?

dasil003 3y ago

This is awkward. I get that there's sexism in tech, no argument there. But it's just not true that web design was sprung from whole cloth as a new discipline and then later became gendered at women coders' expense. I was there in the 90s, and designers were already there, and yes there was already gender bias. The thing was, the bulk of designers in the 90s used PageMaker/InDesign/Illustrator and it took a while for that discipline to converge with HCI and UI design. These things sort of converged in the web world later, and yes there was gender bias, but that bias existed historically. Furthermore, if you go further back, before my time, there was much greater representation of women in programming and "making computers go beep boop" which had steadily declined over many decades. I won't presume to analyze the root causes of gender bias in tech, but it's just lazy thinking to blame the decline of the hybrid designer/coder as being due to sexism and "role gendering". The more obvious answer is that the depth of expertise needed for modern UX design and front-end development grew by a lot, and hence the generic "web designer" role disappeared in favor of greater specialization. Blaming this on the patriarchy might get you sympathy and clicks in the current zeitgest, but it doesn't really say antyhing about causality or what's actually going on.

interpol_p 3y ago

I posted this not because I thought it would be inflammatory, but because I very much agreed with the point that design is not as far “to the left” as it should be I started out as an animator/designer, and then became a developer. I became a developer because I wanted to write plugins for the 3D modelling software I used. Over the decades I have become extremely jaded at how companies I have worked for organise into “UX Design” and “Development” teams. It is utter nonsense Everyone I have worked with, once trained, is capable of doing both — perhaps not everyone tackles design or development with the same passion, but teams who have comfort with both areas of app/web design and development often produce superior products Now I am in a position to build a team at a company that is divided into “UX” and “Development.” I hope to ask people on the design team to install Xcode and Android Studio, to get comfortable making quick prototypes in Compose and SwiftUI, to update asset catalogues and colours, and to make branches and commit changes. Designers are genuinely excited about this Similarly, I have started giving developers edit access to Figma, helping them produce design and visually communicate on a Figma board, tweak and suggest designs, and even build parts that can be approved by people on the “design team.” Developers have no problem doing this I am hoping that the lines between “designer” and “developer” dissolve and we simply have coordinated teams, with talented people able to direct the vision for both aspects of a product In my personal side projects everyone is treated as both designer and developer, no one “blindly implements” design (which I have experienced at many large companies) and no one creates design without understanding the nuances of the platform. This results in much less back-and-forth, and products that ship with more consistent UI design

mediumsmart 3y ago

A web designer, whatever her gender, is a dude who makes websites, including the design. The programmers finally were able to do that too when frameworks aka bootstrap did the design for them. That’s why all corporate websites look the same and nowadays the self employed genders can get design and programming from the WordPress so the majority of their sites looks like that too or they can hire someone who can’t program or design but knows how to put the text and the images into WordPress or joomla and if the favicon of the result is custom they are above average. Real web designers are incredibly rare and they don’t do tutorials. Even Rachel Andrews or Jen Simmons, who are great web designers don’t fully qualify. Designing and typing into a computer are just too far apart. All tutorials are from YouTube professionals and they always include a framework because web developers can’t do design, they ‘build’ websites from components. And here’s the thing, the dev parts of a site can be formalized (thank you thank you thank you Andy) while the design aspect cannot. So designers can now do real web design, web developers can disassociate their opinions from their employer, Andy can give awesome key notes and companies can hire companies to get their flavor of bootreact on rails or whathaveyou. All webdev sucks but Webdesign for the small web sucks less.

tipiirai 3y ago
> is a dude who makes websites "dude": a man; a guy (from Oxford Languages)
- intvocoder 3y ago
  Personally, I subscribe to the inclusive, Good Burger, definition of dude. I’m a dude, he’s a dude, she’s a dude, ‘cause we’re all dudes, hey.
  - tipiirai 3y ago
    I'm with you Bro!

wryoak 3y ago

> gendering of web design YMMV but personally, while I've met both male and female developers of all stripes and strats, I’ve only met male web designers, so this thesis doesn’t resonate strongly with me.

dzek69 3y ago

I've never heard that web design is a "femine" work. Anyone knows where the author lives? So different culture

jacknews 3y ago

"I don't know how else to answer this, besides: the gendering of design as women's work is why people don't use the title "web designer" anymore." Yeah ... nope. The reason for the split (and I think it started earlier) is that front-end development changed from being a bit of HTML, CSS and a smattering of JS or PHP, to real actual structured, architected programming with complex frameworks etc. Web design similarly become something much more professional, and more aligned with design in other fields. Therefore 'web design' carried an air of amateurism, and was no longer fashionable versus simply 'design'.