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The Dribbblisation of Design

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Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#51

Post by wuliwong »

nemothekid wrote: post #8
coldcode wrote: post #3

When I read this type of criticism, I always get the impression that everyone thinks they are better at what they do than everyone else.

How so? And what is "this type of criticism"? To me it looks like the design world has taken one concept and hyped and warped it, missing the point of the original goals. I don't see this article as any different than the misuse of Hadoop article that was posted yesterday.

What is "the design world"? Some people made a website (dribbble.com) and some people use it. There is no monolithic "design world".

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#52

Post by bigiain »

Aloisius wrote: post #48
dreamfactory wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even graphic design isn't about eye candy but about function - graphic design is at base macrotypography. What we seem to have in web design is a deeply ingrained culture of amateurism - can you imagine if we had designers adding gradients, page-curls, and drop-shadows on airport signage? The thing that scares me is that in future we might as the definition and function of a professional designer is completely eroded…

> can you imagine if we had designers adding gradients, page-curls, and drop-shadows on airport signage? Instead we have designers adding lighting and depth to create gradients and shadows. Good golly, have you been to a modern airport recently? Sure form follows function, but there is absolutely no hesitation on the part of designers to degrade function to make things sexy unless you work in government. Let's not pr…

"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk, and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the departure gates, presumably on the assumption that they are not" – Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul

(In all honesty, I suspect I'm guilty of producing several websites that could easily be accused of those same faults – though I don't _think_ I've ever accidentally sent anyone to Murmansk…)

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#53

Post by bitwize »

I do not expect a company with a name that seems cribbed straight from the lyrics to "Here Comes Another Bubble" to remain a mainstay of standards in the design world for very long.

This, too, shall pass.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#54

Post by colmvp »

snowwrestler wrote: post #46
toddmorey wrote: post #10

The article contains this gem: ...Redesigns of other people’s work is pure folly e.g. the new Yahoo logo, iOS7, changes to Facebook, the New New Twitter, the American Airlines rebrand. People have no context for the decision making process involved in these projects, no knowledge of the requirements, constraints, organisational politics. First, most of these redesigns are done in good fun, as a thought exercise for t…

I upvoted you but I disagree. When designers do unsolicited "spec" redesigns of big brands, I don't think they are representing the customer. You can't represent the customer without doing some real research with real customers. I can't remember ever seeing those sorts of results in a spec redesign post. Instead, I think they are using the brand as a canvas to show off their own abilities. And they always pick a big…

Well it's not just to promote their work, it's because that specific brand could use an update.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#55

Post by colmvp »

camus wrote: post #49

The problem with this article is the author doesnt understand that 1/ People are not going to post briefs,diagrams, or product strategies of their clients. No business want these informations to be public. It's like sharing the source code of some proprietary app. Even during an interview you dont do that. 2/ Dribble is for static assets , png ,final results that can be made public, not some hidden documents on the w…

Exactly. Dribbble is a canvas where you post whatever the fuck you want knowing that most likely you won't be able to use it anyway. It's a way to say, "look how cool it is", and move on.

It's not unlike posting a snippet of cool JS/CSS/whatever on HN and showcasing it. Yes it's not practical but it COULD be inspirational.

One reason why fashion shows exist is to give trickle inspiration to other fashion designers, not to be an exercise in practicality.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#56

Post by bigiain »

einai wrote: post #17

I'm a designer on Dribbble. The work I present on Dribbble and the "actual" work I do for my clients are quite different most of the time. You can think of Dribbble as the "runway" of graphic/UI design - most of the stuff there are for showing off the designers' ability and/or are conceptual. They are fun and beautiful to look at, but not always designed for practical use, just like most people won't wear runway fash…

So it sounds to me like you agree with him – your Dribbble content is closer to "digital art" than "examples of your typical design work".

I wonder if there'd be an opportunity for a Dribbble-like site to showcase your "business goal articulation" or "optimised interaction flow"? I'm guessing not – partly because I don't think nearly as many people do that work for "fun" (in the way that many people _do_ create polished final renderings as an art/pastime), but mostly because I suspect there's significantly more business value in them – I'd expect to see that sort of higher-level business-strategic work showcased as whitepapers on a Digital Agency's website (or locked away behind NDAs or contractual/provacy agreements with the clients).

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#57

Post by bigiain »

bitwize wrote: post #53

I do not expect a company with a name that seems cribbed straight from the lyrics to "Here Comes Another Bubble" to remain a mainstay of standards in the design world for very long. This, too, shall pass.

While I mostly agree with you, I bet the AltaVista team at Digital said the same thing about that stupidly named "Google" company started by those two academics with no business experience…

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#58

Post by colmvp »

brianfryer wrote: post #42
Aloisius wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has hired designers over the years for various startups, I agree. The author seems to conflate UX with visual design or graphic design. They are not the same thing and often aren't done by the same person. I've had fantastic UX designers who, frankly, can't get perfectly laid out pixel perfect work done or do eye candy. I've had UI/graphic designers who were awful at figuring out flow. I've had people…

> The author seems to conflate UX with visual design or graphic design I can see that. What I got from the author is that "sexy" should be emergent and not fundamental.

Depends. I think with consumer related startus, sexy is pretty important.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#59

Post by colmvp »

bigiain wrote: post #56
einai wrote: post #17

I'm a designer on Dribbble. The work I present on Dribbble and the "actual" work I do for my clients are quite different most of the time. You can think of Dribbble as the "runway" of graphic/UI design - most of the stuff there are for showing off the designers' ability and/or are conceptual. They are fun and beautiful to look at, but not always designed for practical use, just like most people won't wear runway fash…

So it sounds to me like you agree with him – your Dribbble content is closer to "digital art" than "examples of your typical design work". I wonder if there'd be an opportunity for a Dribbble-like site to showcase your "business goal articulation" or "optimised interaction flow"? I'm guessing not – partly because I don't think nearly as many people do that work for "fun" (in the way that many people _do_ create polis…

I mean... behance allows you to present your work in a way that's similar to a case study so people often do writeups and show sketches of their process.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#60

Post by bigiain »

wuliwong wrote: post #50
einai wrote: post #17

I'm a designer on Dribbble. The work I present on Dribbble and the "actual" work I do for my clients are quite different most of the time. You can think of Dribbble as the "runway" of graphic/UI design - most of the stuff there are for showing off the designers' ability and/or are conceptual. They are fun and beautiful to look at, but not always designed for practical use, just like most people won't wear runway fash…

This is exactly how I see it. I just don't see how there's anything wrong with making fun designs, trying new things, hearing people's comments, etc. I am amazed that anybody felt this article was interesting enough to repost. I'm not a designer, but I do a lot of solo projects where I'm responsible for the back and front ends. I enjoy looking around on dribble for ideas and inspiration.

I dunno – I upvoted it pretty much based on this fragment:

" … but work that doesn’t address real business goals, solve real problems people have every day, or take a full business ecosystem into consideration. "

That's a conversation I have almost every day with clients, designers, co-workers, and friends.

"Pixel pushing" visual design is something that some people are very highly skilled at – and the difference between good visual design and bad visual design is obvious even to those of us without the skills to create "good design", _BUT_, in terms of a product or web project it's the last ~20% of the time/money budget. Unless you've got (in the article's terms) the "Mission" and "Vision" properly articulated, and then the "Outcome", "Structure", and "Interaction" properly thought through, you don't really have enough actionable data or goals to appropriately brief a visual designer.

(Having said that, for some businesses and budgets, choosing "existing artwork" and jamming your businesses specific requirements into it might be the right way to go - the same way as most retail stores don't build spaces like Apple Stores, but make compromises based on what's available for rent in the area they want to trade, then "making do" with the space/architecture they end up with. I've helped many clients build inexpensive websites by articulating the solutions to the business problems, then cutting costs by choosing something off somewhere like ThemeForest that's "close enough" and either living with the deficiencys or bodging/hacking over them like a quick paintjob instead of a major shop refitout…)

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