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by digitalengineer 4401 days ago
I think there is a difference between a designer and a UX designer. I meet both kind regularly. The designer is still print-focused and can't wrap his/her head around the fact it's no longer possible to force how something should look. They think 'the look' is what design is about. Often they work from their ivory tower and their idea of communicating is 'sending the PSD'. This kind of designer (and agency) is going the way of the dodo but they still exist.
3 comments

> I think there is a difference between a designer and a UX designer.

Then your vision of the design world is quite simplistic. Having studied both CompSci and Design Engineering at college, I can tell you that design can be very complex, and the term “Designer” is as abstract as “Computer Scientist”, where you have distributed systems researchers, back-end devs, Ops, database administrators, release engineers, QA Engineers, and thousands of specialities.

The design field is HUGE (go and visit IDEO), ranging from mere Graphic Designers (what you've reflected as "PSD Designer"), to UX/UI Designers (those building human-computer interfaces ), to Design Engineers and Industrial Designers that have a solid base of engineering (physics, maths, materials, CAD/CAE, ergonomy, etc) and are able to shape tangible as well as non-tangible products.

Leading Designers [0] usually belong to the latest group... Pininfarina (Ferrari's Designer), Philippe Stark (who worked closely with Steve Jobs crafting his Yatch but also does graphic design and a lot of other design specialities [1]), Jony Ive (leading the iDevices industrial design but also the UI), Dieter Rams, etc.

[0] http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/02/0201_worlds_most_inf...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Starck

Yep, I feel very lucky to work with a designer who actually cares about UX, has a very good knowledge of how HTML/CSS actually works and everything that goes a long with that.

Made hiring a frontend person much much easier.

I call those people "graphic designers" to their faces to be clear they are not UX designers, but make pretty pictures. Behind their backs I call them "web decorators."