Why today’s designers have stopped dreaming or why web design is losing its soul, are a growing concern and had led to the clamor for web designers to rediscover the need for websites that provide an aesthetic experience to users.
Aesthetic experience is defined as an experience qualitatively different from everyday experience and similar to other exceptional states of mind. — Components of aesthetic experience: aesthetic fascination aesthetic appraisal, and aesthetic emotion by Slobodan Markovi.
At last month’s @UXLagos meetup, the inquiry brought up the usual suspects; the abuse of responsive grid design, platform constraints and, front-end design frameworks like Twitter’s bootstrap and Zurb’s foundation however there are other determining factors to be considered.
Creativity takes time so should designers learn how to code?
I’m looking for designers to join our product team at Digital Craft Studios, still looking, and a lot of people were surprised when our job description requested designers that didn’t code or don’t want to learn to how to code.
I believe creativity takes time and effort, so approaching design projects with a divided attention caused by coding (beyond HTML/CSS) is not the best way to speed up the process and perhaps one of the major causes of predictability in design.
designer turned developer?
A lot of designers are transitioning to developers — leaving their primary role of creativity. A transition happening mostly because today’s software industry currently rewards engineers better than designers hence designers are forced to evolve or perish.
$10k makes a difference
While there is a haloed reference to ‘design-led companies’ in the tech industry, in reality, designers are still being pushed to the back of the class in most places — what’s worse is designers are coming to accept this as their lot.
I’m sincerely puzzled as to why this is happening because there is unlimited opportunity for designers to transform a product or service at every stage of it’s life cycle.
Design and development are complementary and should not be confused or subordinated.
If designers are to bring back those so-called aha moments on the web that we long to experience once again, design should be given the chance to lead and thrive.
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Francis’ Medium page.
Feature Image: ‘Design is at the heart of what we do’ via MikeUs
