3 ms·

I've worked with quite a few designers. (Mostly I have hired them for my projects.) And many of them just lack pragmatism. There's a point where stuff is $good

I've worked with quite a few designers. (Mostly I have hired them for my projects.) And many of them just lack pragmatism. There's a point where stuff is $good_enough and a user wouldn't ever notice that it's not optimal - but still many designer tend not to accept this. They strive for perfection. (Which might be fine if they weren't burning my money.) But that's not confined to designers. Lack of pragmatism is generally a problem. Many engineers I know won't let a problem go until their solution would work for every possible edge case - even if it's impossible for said edge case to happen with the current project.

jongold 14y ago
Totally agree; been guilty of it myself in the past. Getting the perfect modular golden-ratio-derived grid is less important than shipping, but being excellent is better than being good. Designer culture in startups is still relatively new; most of us are still relatively recent imports from graphic design & advertising agencies where things are totally different. But I've seen programmers exhibit the same deadly perfectionism in startups (namely, premature optimization. overly-ambitious architecture for week-long MVPs, and writing hundreds of lines of Rspec tests for code that is designed to be thrown out after an experiment).
- kybernetyk 14y ago
  > But I've seen programmers exhibit the same deadly perfectionism in startups Yeah, programmers are not immune to that. When I was younger I wanted to be a game developer. So I made games ... well, I rather designed game engines, threw them away as I came up with 'better' designs and threw those away too because I dreamt up an even better system. In the end I didn't ship even one game in my 6 years of being an aspiring game programmer :)
megablast 14y ago
I have worked with designers who thought sending me a 500px wide background for an iPhone app was just fine, and I should just scale it on my own.
- kybernetyk 14y ago
  Well, I guess that's the other end of the spectrum ;)
fpal3 14y ago
Sounds like you just have an incompatible approach to quality, and you're selling a shoddy product. Your idea of "good enough" almost certainly isn't. Users do notice even if you're too pigheaded to admit it.

jongold 14y ago

Totally agree; been guilty of it myself in the past. Getting the perfect modular golden-ratio-derived grid is less important than shipping, but being excellent is better than being good. Designer culture in startups is still relatively new; most of us are still relatively recent imports from graphic design & advertising agencies where things are totally different. But I've seen programmers exhibit the same deadly perfectionism in startups (namely, premature optimization. overly-ambitious architecture for week-long MVPs, and writing hundreds of lines of Rspec tests for code that is designed to be thrown out after an experiment).

kybernetyk 14y ago
> But I've seen programmers exhibit the same deadly perfectionism in startups Yeah, programmers are not immune to that. When I was younger I wanted to be a game developer. So I made games ... well, I rather designed game engines, threw them away as I came up with 'better' designs and threw those away too because I dreamt up an even better system. In the end I didn't ship even one game in my 6 years of being an aspiring game programmer :)

megablast 14y ago

I have worked with designers who thought sending me a 500px wide background for an iPhone app was just fine, and I should just scale it on my own.

kybernetyk 14y ago
Well, I guess that's the other end of the spectrum ;)

fpal3 14y ago

Sounds like you just have an incompatible approach to quality, and you're selling a shoddy product. Your idea of "good enough" almost certainly isn't. Users do notice even if you're too pigheaded to admit it.