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In the past I have been a fairly serious seed-beadworker. On more than one occasion I have had people look at a piece of beadwork which took me 40 hours of hand stitching to complete and ask, "Did you do this by hand?" I'll confess that once or twice I let sarcasm get the best of me and answered, "No, I have a machine that does it all for me". And they believed me! Well there isn't a machine in existence that can do the kind of beadwork that I was creating.
I suspect that the same kind of idea has been present in a few of my web designing experiences. I sometimes suspect that people think web designing involves only competence in the usage of some certain program. I think that clients sometimes picture me sitting at my computer creating their websites with a MS Word type program. So my value becomes my mastery of that program. But the truth is, while there are a range of programs that a web designer must own and master, the process is very organic and human since the website will be viewed and used by humans. And programs cannot make the kind of aesthetic judgments necessary for good art or good web design.
This week there is a worthwhile article on the subject on alistapart.com. Recommended reading for designers and website owners.
Quote
Design on a production line
Web design is still a young discipline, and it’s generally poorly understood. As the web becomes mainstream, an increasing number of people and organizations want websites—and so more people are involved in commissioning, managing, and designing them. It’s not surprising that many of these people aren’t familiar with how web design works. Clients, managers, and colleagues often assume that web design is a subset of some other discipline, like advertising, graphic design, or software engineering. This creates a tendency to write it off as a low-value, straightforward process that can be streamlined and automated, like a production line.
The result is unhelpful pressure on you, the web designer. You’re asked to design faster, using a smaller budget, and without access to key stakeholders—which can make it difficult to maintain your professionalism, leaving everyone unhappy with the final design. The logical conclusion of this perpetual streamlining would be to stop using your judgment altogether, as if you were a piece of off-the-shelf software: a robot.
The problem I’m describing is a lack of respect for web design as a profession, primarily caused by ignorance. My proposed solution is to educate, by demonstrating that the value you add to the design process comes from using human judgment and experience—in a way that can’t be replaced by streamlined or automated processes.
Web design is still a young discipline, and it’s generally poorly understood. As the web becomes mainstream, an increasing number of people and organizations want websites—and so more people are involved in commissioning, managing, and designing them. It’s not surprising that many of these people aren’t familiar with how web design works. Clients, managers, and colleagues often assume that web design is a subset of some other discipline, like advertising, graphic design, or software engineering. This creates a tendency to write it off as a low-value, straightforward process that can be streamlined and automated, like a production line.
The result is unhelpful pressure on you, the web designer. You’re asked to design faster, using a smaller budget, and without access to key stakeholders—which can make it difficult to maintain your professionalism, leaving everyone unhappy with the final design. The logical conclusion of this perpetual streamlining would be to stop using your judgment altogether, as if you were a piece of off-the-shelf software: a robot.
The problem I’m describing is a lack of respect for web design as a profession, primarily caused by ignorance. My proposed solution is to educate, by demonstrating that the value you add to the design process comes from using human judgment and experience—in a way that can’t be replaced by streamlined or automated processes.
