We Should Stop Bullying Visual Designers
A few nights ago, my partner and I had an interesting and honest conversation about passive aggression in the design community. At one point we both agreed that glorifying the “UX/Product/designer-who-codes/🦄” is a problem. I’ve been in a similar position for the last few years to the point where I spend more time in Atom than anything, but I’ve never guessed how people outside our bubble might feel.
Most of us started our design careers doing visual design. At some point, some of us felt like working in a more code-heavy/data-driven/system-building environment (you don’t have to pick one) feels better. Others continued improving their visual skills and became, logically, great visual designers.
Many visual designers these days feel the urge to learn to code or improve their product skills. Inevitably, this takes away from their core craft. If this is done from the heart, then great, being T-shaped is awesome. That’s how I’m approaching my work too. Unfortunately, many visual designers are expanding their skills in disciplines they don’t really enjoy practicing. The result? Designers with mediocre product skills and tonnes of unrealized potential at what they actually enjoy doing: visual design.
Imagine if more mature industries had similar internal passive aggression. Classic architects vs engineers, industrial designers vs manufacturing engineers, dentists vs dental technologist, mission-control team vs astronauts. It sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it?
Design is huge. It’s getting bigger with every passing second. There’s never been a better time to be a designer and we finally have our seats at the table. Like any other industry, design consists of a myriad of sub-disciplines.
“Feels so good doing user testing and working on the actual product instead of designing pretty icons and buttons.”
Next time you’re about to tweet something like that, stop for a while and try to be thankful that other people love what they do as much as you do so you don’t have to do it. It works both ways and it’s a solid system. The only thing it requires is breaking up with your ego.
