I can see already that your blood pressure is going up as you recall hearing similar words … unless you’re fortunate enough to be that revered graphic designer who gets free reign to fill that 1280×1024 white canvas with whatever you want.
No, I don’t hate you – I also know it’s not that simple. I’ve worked alongside enough graphic designers to know the pain you go through, watching clients pull apart your beautiful artwork like hyenas ripping apart a zebra while it still lives.
But for us, the other sort of designer … you can’t blame us for feeling envious. You get client-time, you get to influence. We’re often at the end of the queue, the bottom of the food chain, the lower rung of Pascal’s triangle. We don’t get a say, we don’t get to bring to bear our years and years of accumulated knowledge, skills and experience and that makes us a little resentful.
So to my fellow user interface designers and front-end web developers … draw a line in the sand, put your foot down, say no. To use your skills and ingenuity to hack and coerce HTML, CSS and JavaScript to support an interface designed by someone with only half the necessary skills doesn’t help anyone, least of all you – who goes home at night and buries your head in a glass of scotch screaming “If only they’d bothered to ask me!“. There are many professions where challenging the expert advice of a specialist is unthinkable … you wouldn’t tell your plumber to just put a bandage over a leak or ignore your mechanic’s recommendation to replace your tyres.
Don’t devalue yourself just because others don’t value you. I’m not suggesting you say “No!” to everything – that’ll just get you fired. But don’t let yourself get steam-rolled. Don’t make a habit of meekly whispering “Yes sir” to everything. Don’t set a precedent of letting things go through. From the very first screen mockup, start providing your feedback and if things shouldn’t be done in a certain way then don’t say “Well, I could make that work“. Say “No, that can’t be done. But we can do this instead“.
Do it for your sanity. Do it for your colleagues and your industry. Do it for your client, employer and users.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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Or you could be the “graphic designer” with UX, IA skills that can tell the clients in their special client time why it will not work and how to implement the perfect design. ;)
I do feel you pain however. Worse is when you put your foot down and they just roll it out anyway. And then don’t pay you. That really hurts.
A lovely post, Nat, and a good reminder to keep balancing “client is king” with “I know what I’m doing”.