USWDS: The United States Web Design System

One thing I've noticed is that art students have looked into pivoting into UI/UX design because it pays. There are skills and intuition that transfer, such as designing for visual hierarchy. In fact, there are even systemic ways in design school to do color analysis. One way is to take a screenshot of the page and view it in greyscale in Photoshop. I've seen every corporate designer talk about accessibility, but not a single one of them do something like this. They will spend time coming up with a color theme for the brand, but it's really about their own personal brand, not the company's.

The problem becomes when ego takes over and people treat service design as their own aesthetic endeavor. Craigslist is good design. HackerNews is good design. Google was a design innovator under Marissa Meyer. Now it feels like Google's design department is just bikeshedding. Material design is a yawnfest but the whole lexicon around it feels pretentious, bordering on those abstract post-modern descriptions in art museums. "Leveraging fluid streams of irregular forms, the artist manifests environmental concerns to provoke sublinear ethereal emotions latent in time and memory". I remember an architecture class where one of the exam questions was "Check all the following that describe the architectural style of the Byzantine empire". One of the answers was "abstract". Out of 50 questions on the exam, this question was one of the questions that tripped people up the most. The instructor held a session for people to review the exam and express their grievances. Some of the students felt this question was biased towards Westerners, and asked the lecturer what "abstract" meant. The lecturer responded "abstract means abstract". To this day I still dwell on whether this instructor knows what abstracts means.

The hardest class I took in university was not Operating Systems, String Theory, nor even graduate level Philosophy. It was modern architecture. The text was harder to read and understand than Kant. Even using Google Translate on some classic Chinese text makes more sense. Maybe Google Translate should add "design" as a language (not to be confused with design language and design systems). Yes, there are ideas being transferred and communicated, but 90% of the content felt like it's not making any substantive or meaningful statement. It literally felt like reading Infinite Jest.

And so we end up with bloated CSS. Why use lot CSS when few CSS do trick? HackerNews still has personality and brand, and people who built an HN clone might remember bits of it in their head. In fact, when my girlfriend talks to me she just says "oh, did you read that on The Orange Website?" Designers feel it is business critical and that the product shouldn't launch if we don't have rounded corners with an exact amount of curvature, or the line height is off by 1. Yes, some engineers shouldn't be left to their own accord and build dashboards that look like it was built by engineer. Maybe we can also blame the media perception that Steve Jobs is a perfectionist. He probably is, but most software products are CRUD apps and don't need an academic treatise on design. I've worked at a place where designers always wear black, and as far as a turtleneck. I've considered going back to school for Industrial Design, and having UI/UX design as a fallback, but when I think about the cliquey and political overhead of the day-to-day, I just stay collecting my engineering paycheck so that eventually I don't have to rely on a paycheck and then muddle my personal ego with doing corporate design work.

I have designer friends outside of work where I can observe designers out the corporate veil. Their priorities ( corporate politics are different topic ) are not aligned with the user. They treat the work as the pyramid of Giza, or at least something to cement their careers and portfolio. The problem when art students become UI/UX designers is that they view their design as art: "what does the work say/convey?" / "what artistic boundaries is it pushing?". That's not relevant to useful software.

This is not unique to designers. Computer Science graduates have a tendency to shoehorn all their academic learnings into the source code. Angular felt like people needing to flex all the design patterns they learned from Gang of Four. At least in my bubble, it felt like frontend engineers always felt an inferiority complex. I don't think that's warranted, but nonetheless frontend engineers need to remind people they have a computer science degree, too. And so the Node ecosystem becomes what it is. Go felt like it was designed by pragmatic programmers, not object oriented philosophers inspired by Plato's theory of form.

Designing to be aesthetically interesting is okay, too, insofar that it does not hinder the user experience. It's kind of cruel that Microsoft ended up being more aesthetically interesting than Google. In terms of being original, interesting and aesthetic, Metro is better than Material, and XBox is better than whatever hardware Google cranks out. Then again, Microsoft is more engaged and in-tune open source and the frontend ecosystems nowadays than Google is. Less than decade ago, my Microsoft friends was perplexed why anyone would want to build a web app with HTML5 when they can build native applications with C#. I think Google would be better off if they lower compensation, I might consider rejoining.

https://www.section508.gov/

I think web design can convey similar things, sometimes at the cost of utility. For example, a website may want to convey that it’s for professionals and businesses. Or that it’s fun & silly like a toy. Or that it’s for academics and learning. The style of the site helps to identify if you’re in the right place for your “group”. users can look past bad UI. In fact, they will often complain if you decide to “improve” the UI without their consent.

Bootstrap and other opinionated frameworks are super handy when you don't have designs/designers though.