Dear Designer

To all the designers I have loved before..

Dear Designer,

I can’t quit you. Trust me, I have tried. You don’t complete me, you complement me, and I am a better version of myself when I am with you, than when I am without.

I have never considered myself a pessimist. Just a realist. I am the realist in the relationship and you are the dreamer. I’m thankful that you are, that you are full of hope and promise and that you have a damn glass that is perpetually half full no matter what angle from which you look at it.

You embrace risk while I mitigate it, you conjure the impossible while I try to execute it.

You challenge me in ways that I have learned to love, helped me grow in ways that I welcome, but that I could not have ever anticipated. You push me to do things I am reluctant to try , to do things that make absolutely no sense no matter how you rationalized it.

You did not remove “no” from my vocabulary, but you certainly made it much harder to say. And I cursed you, how I cursed you. I was sure you did not understand me, or that you didn’t care to understand me and that you disrespected my needs or my process. There are two of us in this relationship- some might argue more but let’s leave polyamory out of this for the moment. It took me some time to realize it was not always about me.

You are not trying to make things harder , you are trying to make things better. It was never about me, it was always about what we were making.

You need to know that I appreciate what you do. I know you are more than a “pretty picture” maker, and that people who use that term probably still think something is not quite right without a lens flare. These are the same people who lust for leaping flames,gold 3D type, bigger logos, canned layer effects, and ideally all of the above in one blessed union of design brilliance.

I know that design is not layout. I know that it is much more than that, and realize you have been undervalued as your function has been sadly over-simplified. I imagine this must piss you off. It would piss me off, but then again, just about anything out of the ordinary pisses me off. I long for structure, for familiarity.

Let us find these people who think such a thing, let us hunt them down, find them and take them out at the knees. I can hold them down while you repeatedly poke them in the chest until they piss themselves. I could write a program that replaces the culprit’s entire music library with the perennial classic “Lady in Red” by Chris DeBurgh, while retaining the original file names. All this to say, I have your back as you have had mine.

We both know design is not an afterthought. It is not the last thing you do. It is not a coat of paint. Housewives from the 1950's paint their face, the things we make do not.

I make things work, but you make people trust that they work well. You are much more considerate than I, putting the user first — before you, before me, before the deadline, before the budget.

Comic Sans and lime green is my way of checking to see if you are listening to me. I mean no disrespect when I brutalize your designs during implementation. Sometimes I am short on time when your design rounds start bleeding into my timelines. Sometimes I’m focused on everything under the hood. I have no excuses — I know it is important, that is it necessary, that it cannot be compromised. I’m working on this. Let me work on this with you. You won’t always need to be the backseat pixel pusher as we correct sizes and alignments together at my computer. One day I’ll drop the training wheels and one day maybe you’ll learn to let go a little bit.

We share more than ideas. We share successes and failures. We share disappointment when great work gets shelved for reasons beyond our control. We share pride in good work and in it being well received. We share the long hours, the grunt work — sometimes even laughter,and always the accolades. We share the secret that creativity is a front for problem solving and no one has bothered to bust it yet.

Making things is as close as we will come to having children together. There is no birth, there is only a launch and case studies become the baby books. We learn to let go. We learn to cope when these beautiful babies become ugly kids and realize they can’t always be a direct reflection on us.

I can’t imagine making things without you even though many developers do. Dear designer, keep pushing me, keep asking for more when I look like I have nothing to give.

Keep asking why not, dear designer, when I ask why.

Lots of love & 1010101s,

Your Developer