Let’s talk about something real quick.
UI is NOT UX, or vice versa …… There I said it. I feel better.
But if that’s true, then why do I get a thousand email updates a day from job listing apps of companies looking to hire a UI/UX designer? Why are these 2 significantly different specialties constantly grouped together as if you’re going to get lucky and find a 2 for one employee then proceed to underpay them because they’re doing “one job?”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my career. I’m constantly trying to figure out where I fit in this new saturated world of product, UI, UX, web, digital, and package designers, to name just a few. I consider myself a traditional Graphic Designer. My main area of focus has always been on Identity Design /Branding, as well as apparel design ( I worked in screen printing for quite a while which was the most fun and educational period of my career).
Traditional Graphic Design may be dead. It’s still alive and well on Instagram for instance. It’s become an industry filled with Graphic Designers designing for other Graphic Designers essentially, where we all just share passion projects in hopes we’ll get some exposure and be a part of the discussion. But for the most part, there’s so many designers out there who have been reduced to content creators, creating tutorials on how they made a random graphic or poster, in the hopes to stay relevant.
UI is one of those places in the new design world where Graphic Designers can still flex a bit. Of course there is always thought and planning that have to be considered, and results that have to be met (that’s a given), but UI is not UX. As a Graphic Designer who has been working on UI projects for the past 5+ years, I do not consider myself a UX designer.
Of course, there is crossover. I think UX designers and UI designers should work very closely together from the very beginning stages of a project all the way through to the end and in to the fine tuning and iterating phases, but each position or title has very different specialities and backgrounds.
Which leads me to this thought … web design, and to an extent design in general, is increasingly becoming a world of sameness. I see so little originality in web design, in favor of striping everything down and creating this minimal sameness world. Can it be, because we’ve taken the true graphic designers in the world and replaced them with researchers?
