stevenclark.com.au

Say it – Design is NOT just Photoshop, Illustrator and gradients. Say it – an information site should never have a 750KB home page and 500KB sub pages. Quick links should not be 2 points smaller than the already small pixel sized text and pushed below the fold in tiny slivers using colours as illustrious as white text on yellow and white text on tan. And, it shouldn’t be said that a 300KB fluff image has any place on a web site – let alone on an already overloaded homepage. And for fuck sake it’s stupid to make hyperlinks a shade of blue so close to the ordinary text colour – without underlines – even I find it hard to locate them (on the basis that hovering over them shows a hand anyway – are you shitting me?).

It’s all too easy for people who use Photoshop and Illustrator as power users to lean over and point the finger of dismissal at someone like myself with off-the-cuff remarks that I’m not a designer. Not really. Just a coder. What would a coder know about design? Real design. Pushed to the back with undermining contempt as someone hovering between the world of the programmer and of real designers who use Photoshop like superstars. A CSS guy. Not a designer. Even worse, when management supports agrees with that paradigm.

I’m sorry but I’m a designer thankyou. I have worked hard to build a certain level of knowledge and expertise about interface design and web development. I’m far from the best, but in a little pond I’m pretty fucken good at what I do. My value proposition to an organisation is I can make them money and improve their product.

When I walk into a work situation I am very sure of what I bring in off the street that doesn’t exist there without me. It’s these unique skills that make me valuable to the organisation. Sometimes it can be like being the only person who assesses good software on the grounds of whether it can be accessed, used and meets a business objective.

I am every bit a designer in the true sense. In the words of Gordon Ramsay – For Fuck Sake! It’s not just about pretty fucken pictures at stupid file sizes.

Update:  18 September, 2008
It appears that I’m now between jobs / contracts. Easy come, easy go. But I AM a designer.. and, why hire me just to make me assimilate? What a waste of resources, time and money? Wouldn’t it be better to hire people and utilise skills? Bah!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 8:36 pm and is filed under design, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.