Cheap assets.
No cheap designers.
Like Khoi Vinh, I’m sometimes worry about the “increasing commoditization of design”.
Every day, we see more excellent design assets available, at low price or even for free!
Should we be worry about our design skills devaluated?
Will our jobs be replaced by low cost workers, adapting 39$ templates bought on Envato or Creative Market?
Let’s go back to 2002.
In 2002, I was extremely worry. I was a freelance web designer trying to bill $50/hour for designing websites. So when I learned about the launch of Template Monster, I thought: “We are doomed!” Customers could buy a full website template for the price of just 1 hour of my work.
Template Monster is the ancestor of all these marketplaces. Incredibly, their templates quality was good. They even offered catchy Flash introductions (it was 2002 man… Flash was the future :-)
12 years after, Template Monster is still selling templates, but we are short of web designers talents (well, we says UX/UI designers now…). A good designer can still bill $100/hour, and they are overwhelmed by customer demand.
So, why the cheap templates offer didn’t kill our jobs?
A template doesn’t make a website
Typical scenario: our “cheap charlie” customer browse a template gallery, pick an awesome design, and forward it to the low cost designer. The destruction work starts…
Helped by the customer bad directions, and the designer inexperienced work, the eye-candy design will become a monster. The more the low cost designer touch it, the worse it is.
A good design is a thoughtful balance of good taste and subtle decisions. When you buy a template, you don’t buy the good taste and the experience. If you like a template, you should hire the designer who made it!
No matters if it’s a After Effect or a website template: you need a designer as good as the template. That doesn’t come as cheap.
A designer job is as much designing than convincing
IMHO, a designer have to resist the bad taste assaults from customers or co-workers. To guarantee quality, consistency, and give a strong and unique design direction. It take a lot of time, and authority, to be able to impose your designer views.
How a low cost designer can be heard and convincing? He doesn’t have enough experience, enough self-assurance, and anyway he’s hired for cheap… He won’t try to spend too much time on debating.
A template doesn’t magically transfer the experience and authority to a low cost designer. A good design come from a long pathway of debates and decisions: you need a skilled designer for that.
Should we burn these damn templates? Is Creative Market evil?
First, I’m sure you’ve already bought something on these marketplaces ;-)
I actually buy a lot of creative assets on marketplaces, and I’m glad I doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time I’m designing. The quality is going up, the prices are affordable, and it saves me a lot of time.
I personally bought assets like patterns, devices mockups, icons, textures. And yeah, I’m selling there too :-)
Like developers, we need assets
Unless you are working for a huge company, or a customer with a lavish budget, you won’t have enough time to design everything from scratch.
That reminds me a lot of what happened to the developers world in the past 10 years. They increasingly relied on coding frameworks, libraries or plugins to code faster and better.
But you need a good developer to pick the right library and to know how to tweak it, and make the best of it. In wrong hands, a mixup of libraries and frameworks will also become a monster.
That’s the same for the creative assets. No matter how good they are, you need a skilled designer to make a good use of it. It take years of obsessed work to produce a good designer, and they are still too rare. So designers won’t become cheaper, even with tons of cheap assets around.
Creative assets are cheap. Good designers will never be.
