The Dribbblisation of Design

This article offers many solid advice for that talented albino sasquatch designer looking to differentiate himself in his job application for a well-funded start up.

But for the rest of us monkeys, having an extremely solid looking visual design skill (even at the expense of being a bit too trendy) will serve us well. These days, I have to go through about 30 resumes to see 1 that has fairly good design skill, and still not Dribbbbbble level.

When a potential client contacts me on Dribbble, I usually send them samples of my "real" work so they can get a better idea of what they will be getting from me.

I used Forrst for a while, and some people posted design processes there. However, people are naturally drawn to eye candies more. Like others have mentioned, Behance is another option.

The web is content, the net is machinery.

When you are on Xbox and playing against someone else, you are playing over the internet but you are not playing over the web. Similarly, you can download web pages but you cannot download the internet.

Most people in hiring positions couldn't give two shits that a designer is supposed to do more than just make things pretty- And so they hire people who call themselves "designers" that actually are little more than glorified photoshop operators. Why? because these "designers" are cheaper than these other "designers" and it's not obvious why. The amateurs undercut the professionals.

This puts the real designers, the ones with educations, that actually know design principles, typography, psychology, etc, and have years of experience- in the difficult situation of having to distinguish themselves from these interested amateurs- these "stylists". So I believe, in a turn of marketing genius, some designers came up with the term "UX", and insist that it is NOT this lowly "design" thing, as you know it. It's this totally different thing that is /more/ than just making things look pretty.

Even though, all the things under the "UX" banner are familiar to people with design educations as "design".

That's what "Design" is. UX is just "Design". These are the normal things that you have to do to make a design work.

But how do you communicate that? How do you communicate that Javascript and HTML are capable of so much more now, than they were 5 years ago? You come up with a buzz word. Ajax. Web 2.0. HTML5. To experts who actually know their craft, these are obvious wank words. Meaningless checkboxes that accountants and recruiters can look for on resumes, designed to repackage skills that are decades old as something new and exciting.

But this is hacker news. We shouldn't have to use bullshit marketing terms here. That's for recruiters. That's for clients. Cut the shit, I say. Use the real words with their real meanings.

Your logo looks good. Visually, it's fine...

But what's the point of having dual colored shapes? Why is there a circle behind the antennas? What does the robot represent? Why orange? If you showed the logo to someone, would they be able to think of a word that coincides with a goal/mission of your company? Why is it looking down? If you're looking to predict (keywords: future, time, ready, etc.) then why not make it look forward?

These are the types of questions that struck me first looking at the logo. It feels like there was more focus on how it looked than to what it represents. That's how Dribble designs feel.

They look good and they get the job done (i.e. you have a logo, a client gets a site, etc.), but when you combine functionality with design, that's a real home run.

Using logo design as the example, the first goal of the designer should be to understand the company. What does it want to do? Why does it exist? Like a person, you want to get to know it before you can label it. Once you have the part of what you want to symbolize, what you want to communicate, you can start sketching. Start trying to really capture the soul of the company and present it in an aesthetic and still functional way.

Having aesthetics without much focus on function, that's what I feel the author is categorizing Dribble designers as.

Having functionality without aesthetic, well, we'll use an automobile for that example. A functional without aesthetic car would be a garbage truck.

Having aesthetics and function, you get brands like Porsche, Apple, Lego, OXO...

Sorry for going on a rant using your logo :-)