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It gets worse when they seem to be proud of it too.
Just checkout any GNU project or other "hardcore hacker" projects like OpenBSD.
You can spot their design feel from a thousand miles away.
"Ugly and proud of it!"
Anyways, here are my thoughts from my observations as a creative individual.
Good design is a by-product of an individual's relentless pursuit of solving one or many problems. Very rarely do you have more than one of these individuals on a design team because they are stubborn and idealistic. But they have to be.
They are leaders that excel at providing a collaborative environment for everyone on the team.
They listen to every good or bad idea without dismissing that person's energy or intent behind it. They respect the person above all else.
They inspire those around them into new directions and encourage people to let go of all their preconceptions.
They protect against all the conscious and subconscious biasses that influence our design decisions.
They embrace mistakes and experiment with the unknown.
They check their ego.
This individual realizes that their quest towards great design is filled with a lot of failures, hard work, and loneliness. But the reward of seeing good design first-hand is worth it.
They do it because they care and it's worth doing right, not because they are told to do it.
Anyone can be creative; it just requires looking at the world differently.
Pick up a rock, what do you see? Is it just a rock? What are all the ways that you could use that rock? Now place the rock in your pocket, and throughout the day ask yourself about that rock. If you do this just for a single day, you might just find something that could benefit from a rock.
Cheers.
As a further reason, consider an instructive metaphor: if you asked a blacksmith why he sucks at writing, his answer would probably be “That’s not what they pay me for.”
Most designers suck at design. Consider the convergence of design of laptops and smartphones. If designers were competent, we would see a multitude of designs, since a good design must be designed for something, analoguous to how optimization must optimize for something. Given the extreme similarity between available designs, there are presumably a significant number of professional designers incapable of generating…
Designers don't suck a design, designers solve problems, and often the best solutions all look the same until there is a real tech break-though.
Primarily because most hackers don’t practice or study design. As a further reason, consider an instructive metaphor: if you asked a blacksmith why he sucks at writing, his answer would probably be “That’s not what they pay me for.”
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-...
Primarily because most hackers don’t practice or study design. As a further reason, consider an instructive metaphor: if you asked a blacksmith why he sucks at writing, his answer would probably be “That’s not what they pay me for.”
Except design is far more relevant to programming than writing is to smithing, particularly in FOSS where programmers are often also the ones designing the UI for their applications.