[amonith]

Here's the funny thing though (as a developer which worked for various companies that didn't have designers):

It looks custom designed because... it's not designed at all :D

At this point I'm not even sure if what you said is an insult or a compliment.

Almost all projects I worked in looked more or less like the following:

- a BA meets with the client and creates unstyled wireframes with all of the requested features. (BA doesn't really think about UX here, more or less applies some generic patterns).

- the development team grabs the wireframes, uses a generic preexisting "design system" which is the cheapest for the chosen technology (can be whatever: Bootstrap, Tailwind, Material Design) and max. adjusts colors a bit to match the client's brand

That's it. There is no design.

[whstl]

Doesn't match my experience as a developer.

I haven't worked in a place that doesn't use Figma, since Figma was released.

And haven't worked in a place that didn't get a dedicated designer before the company was 6 months old.

However: I must have worked with 30 different designers in 10 years and TWO of them actually knew how to properly use components and Figma. The rest just copy pasted shit around.

[codr7]

And on the rare occasions where there is a designer on the team, they just throw their fantasy user interfaces over the fence to be interpreted by developers as well as blamed for any complaints.

What we really need is developers with solid design skills, that should have been part of fullstack from the start.

[whstl]

Totally agree. I can count on my hands the number of developers that actually produce consistent good-looking shit.

And the number is *two* if I count the ones who also understand technical nuances, accessibility and proper usability.

[KronisLV]

I second this, it’s like people live in completely different worlds when it comes to getting stuff out the door.

Of course, that’s still better than a 1 pizza team of full stack devs attempting to create their custom UI component library from scratch, now that’s a total mess.

[whstl]

Grandparent here. Alright, I totally believe you and everyone else, and would probably also be much happier in a less wasteful environment that you mention.

In which industry/company size are you? Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.

[KronisLV]

Unfortunately the environments without dedicated designers are also likely to be understaffed or under tight deadlines.

Think along the lines of companies with either <200 employees that can't spare the resources (and also might be lacking in DevOps or other regards, often times falling behind the curve when it comes to all sorts of development practices), or the likes that work in consulting instead of building the product that they sell/dogfood themselves. There you'll get all sorts of people but more fluid team structures - full stack devs that just throw something together for the front end and it's considered good enough.

Of course, it's also possible for companies without the actual means to delude themselves into thinking that they must do everything Google or other big orgs do - that's how you get bad bespoke components and frameworks without the mettle to make them good, as well as stuff like architectures based on microservices without a good reason to do so and so on.