| Oh my god. I cannot upvote this article enough. So many times in my office, my job as a Designer (with a capital D) is dismissively referred to as "making things pretty". "Hey man, can you add a little design flair to this?" Fuck that shit. Our job is more than "make things pretty". Designers should have input on every step in the product cycle, not slap a coat of paint on a project that wasn't designed properly from the beginning. I've been asked numerous times to fix this or that interface, and implement said design changes (since I'm also a developer). This requires me to set up a dev environment for said project, get fully caught up on the project, constraints, etc, then navigate my way through the code and actually make said changes (without breaking anything on the backend, because as a developer it'll be my job to fix that too). Going back and making a "band-aid" style fix can take almost an entire day, when it could have been a 5-minute discussion during the planning phase. Oh, and to top it all off: our graphic artist sits in on those meetings. Apparently this is the norm. |