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I'm a designer - by formal education and by thinking style. I graduated with a BA in Art. By trade, however, I'm a developer. I get paid to write, formulate, an

by bennyg 14y ago

I'm a designer - by formal education and by thinking style. I graduated with a BA in Art. By trade, however, I'm a developer. I get paid to write, formulate, and conceptualize iOS Apps and how they connect with Android, our web services and designing the experience for the easiest use and most pleasurable use. I've never taken a CS class besides the one all undergraduates take (ala "This is Word and Excel, today we're doing sums"). All of this is besides the point, but hopefully it'll illustrate why I hate arguments from both sides of the fence about visual design vs engineering. Engineers tend to think visual designers can't possibly code/build like the engineers. Because they went to school and put in the time, that this knowledge is somehow inaccessible to designers - and that's the way it should be. Flip the coin over and you have very similar arguments. Designers tend to think engineers will never be able to realize aesthetics in their own work, to intuit the feeling certain colors and ratios of visual elements have with each other that leads to the ill-defined "pleasure." Both are wrong, very very wrong. All of this knowledge is accessible to everyone - if you work towards it. A designer can learn to intuit which data structures are necessary to build this/that app, thinking about scalability to infinity while maintaining practicality in the small-scale, before writing a line of code, in the same way an engineer can learn WHY aspects of design are beautiful, and how this beauty is relative to the system (aka the painting, or all of the songs of an album) as a whole. These are trainable things. But you just gotta' get out of your comfort zone and preconceived notions about both design and engineering.

posabsolute 14y ago
I disagree strongly with the author, Yea I designer can learn how to do dev stuff, is he going to do it efficiently in a work environment? I think not. The author talk about front-end development like it's coming increasingly easy, it's the contrary, it's more complex than it ever was. Front-end development is not anymore about doing some css, html & creating a poorly written jquery plugins. It's a whole stack now, you got preprocessors to make css more powerful, a whole lot of tools to automate process, and js mvc to the booth & much more advanced javascript code to handle. Is there exceptions? of course there are, some engineer are incredibly gifted designers and the other way is true, but in general? it's going to stay separate jobs.
- stuffihavemade 14y ago
  Another important point is that the VAST majority of software is not pretty consumer iphone and Rails apps. Some of the products I've worked on have been ugly as sin, but no company truly cares about that vs. the value gained. Imagine two scenarios: 1) A beautiful designed piece of software that increases company revenues by 10%. 2) An ugly (but same ease of use) piece of software that increases company revenues by 10.1%. Which would you rather use at your company? Do I think design is important? Sure. But to say that "designers are eating engineers" because it's easier now to make a twiiter/instagram mash up is ignoring the multi million line code bases that account for most of the "valuable" software.
kyro 14y ago
I dunno, as someone that lacks formal education in either field yet is trying to learn them both on my own, it certainly feels like I'm at a disadvantage at times, that I'll never be quite as good as the BSc's and BA's.
anko 14y ago
I think you're right in that some people can do both. But how good the product is, well, depends a lot on the problem at hand. I spent 8 years at uni doing both visual arts and IT, majoring in programming. I've spent most of my professional career doing a combination of design and programming and I actually believe that the knowledge you gain from one thing influences the other. But both fields are massive, and I believe I could spend my entire career being good at either. Or I could spend my career being mediocre are both. For what it's worth I do a lot of ops work at the moment too, and it's the same kind of thing, but ops + programming is even closer than design + programming. Every good ops guy i've ever met is good at programming, and every good programmer i've ever met is good at ops.

by bennyg 14y ago

posabsolute 14y ago

I disagree strongly with the author, Yea I designer can learn how to do dev stuff, is he going to do it efficiently in a work environment? I think not. The author talk about front-end development like it's coming increasingly easy, it's the contrary, it's more complex than it ever was. Front-end development is not anymore about doing some css, html & creating a poorly written jquery plugins. It's a whole stack now, you got preprocessors to make css more powerful, a whole lot of tools to automate process, and js mvc to the booth & much more advanced javascript code to handle. Is there exceptions? of course there are, some engineer are incredibly gifted designers and the other way is true, but in general? it's going to stay separate jobs.

stuffihavemade 14y ago
Another important point is that the VAST majority of software is not pretty consumer iphone and Rails apps. Some of the products I've worked on have been ugly as sin, but no company truly cares about that vs. the value gained. Imagine two scenarios: 1) A beautiful designed piece of software that increases company revenues by 10%. 2) An ugly (but same ease of use) piece of software that increases company revenues by 10.1%. Which would you rather use at your company? Do I think design is important? Sure. But to say that "designers are eating engineers" because it's easier now to make a twiiter/instagram mash up is ignoring the multi million line code bases that account for most of the "valuable" software.

kyro 14y ago

I dunno, as someone that lacks formal education in either field yet is trying to learn them both on my own, it certainly feels like I'm at a disadvantage at times, that I'll never be quite as good as the BSc's and BA's.

anko 14y ago

I think you're right in that some people can do both. But how good the product is, well, depends a lot on the problem at hand. I spent 8 years at uni doing both visual arts and IT, majoring in programming. I've spent most of my professional career doing a combination of design and programming and I actually believe that the knowledge you gain from one thing influences the other. But both fields are massive, and I believe I could spend my entire career being good at either. Or I could spend my career being mediocre are both. For what it's worth I do a lot of ops work at the moment too, and it's the same kind of thing, but ops + programming is even closer than design + programming. Every good ops guy i've ever met is good at programming, and every good programmer i've ever met is good at ops.