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Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

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Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#111
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Material design is like the design of a typical hotel room. It aims to accommodate everyone. It aims to be a temporary home for everyone and a permanent home for no-one. Hardly anyone would actively choose to make such a clinical, impersonal, unopinionated environment their home. That's what happened with user interfaces when software ate the world – once the UI designers tried to reach everyone, be the place for eve…

I agree with you and the other person who replied. I also see how UIs that have become hotel-room-like are similar to auto design. They're converging on a mean that is efficient which limits uniqueness. I feel like there's a place for being unique and place for being an efficient hotel. Social media sites, ex forums used to have this uniqueness, now they're consolidated hotels for efficiency (not necessarily user fri…

Taken to an extreme, MySpace allowed every user to customise the appearance of their profile. That was great for individuality (and training a generation of web designers) but the site lacked a consistent look-and-feel, and the platform passed from the scene.

I'd like to see it return, though probably in some subcultures (indie music, hospitality exchange) rather than the mainstream.

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have little respect for "artists" who do UI because the job requires little skill. Sites and exposes like the parent of this entire thread serve to inflate the worth of people who do this stuff. Painting the mona lisa is talent. Arranging text and pictures with flat colored geometric elements is NOT talent. The idea that the still life painting is even comparable to some website design is laughable. It takes a lot…

> I have little respect for "artists" who do UI because the job requires little skill. It requires little skill to do it badly , and it's easy to get away with doing it badly. That's not the same thing. This is like people who read some cheesy superhero comics and declare that comics can't be real literature.

This is where we disagree. It requires little skill to do it well.

Minimal/simple/clean designs are not only simple visually but simple from a intelligence and effort standpoint.

There are many UI designers/programmers but their aren't many Character artists/programmers, 3D artists/programmers, animators/programmers, concept artist/programmers.

The reason is the latter examples are two freaking incredibly hard skills to combine. The former dual skill set is common because UI design is extremely trivial compared to the later skill sets.

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#113

As a practicing visual artist / art school hippie who recently got into working as a software engineer I got really excited when I saw this, noted problems aside. But I wasn't surprised to see it was limited to UI/UX. I'm having a really hard time finding other art school grads and visual artists working on the engineering side of tech and it's starting to make me feel a little crazy. Does anyone have any suggestions…

A couple few groups that I know of off the top of my head where you might find a lot of overlap between art and tech type people would be the "metaverse" (virtual worlds engines [1][2] and their users) and the closely related 3d graphic arts/game design [3][4]. [1] http://opensimulator.org/ [2] https://github.com/HalcyonGrid [3] https://www.blender.org/ [4] https://godotengine.org/

There's also the livecoding [0][1] world!

[0] https://toplap.org/ [1] https://supercollider.github.io/

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#114
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoyed this comment. I wish new software was weird , I want software that looks bizarre , stuff that is almost nonsensical until you try to use it and realize it makes you feel good. Everything feels the same today because of hotel room design.

Interestingly enough, this is one of the aspects of being a music producer I enjoy! Every plug-in feels like it’s designed to be inspire you. Let’s be honest, an EQ plugin is super basic in what it does to the sound yet we are blessed with dozens of different designs. It’s the same with any other effect or instrument! The designer's get to have a field day! It’s my biggest criticism of Ableton - they’re built in modu…

>It’s my biggest criticism of Ableton - they’re built in modules (not really plugins) are as bland as the whole DAW and don’t act like 3rd party plugins.

This is one reason why I like Bitwig. It has fewer/inferior native devices compared to Ableton, but I like the UI/UX a lot more, and I almost exclusively use third-party plugins, anyway. Plus it has plugin isolation so a plugin crash won't crash the whole application.

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#115

I think people underestimate how UI aesthetics actually improve user experience. I remember when I was younger it was a lot easier to be more productive and creative with Pages, Numbers, Keynote than their competitors (this was when they were still skeuomorphic). The pretty UI genuinely motivated and inspired me, to an extent that I actually noticed. I really believe it helped start projects easier and work on them l…

missing the geocities eye cancer pages, with the star spinning backgrounds, just kidding, but definitely, the internet has come a long way but there is still a ton of room left for growth

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#116
post #42

I think people underestimate how UI aesthetics actually improve user experience. I remember when I was younger it was a lot easier to be more productive and creative with Pages, Numbers, Keynote than their competitors (this was when they were still skeuomorphic). The pretty UI genuinely motivated and inspired me, to an extent that I actually noticed. I really believe it helped start projects easier and work on them l…

Material design is like the design of a typical hotel room. It aims to accommodate everyone. It aims to be a temporary home for everyone and a permanent home for no-one. Hardly anyone would actively choose to make such a clinical, impersonal, unopinionated environment their home. That's what happened with user interfaces when software ate the world – once the UI designers tried to reach everyone, be the place for eve…

Lol, I just stayed at the SF Grand Hyatt for 5 weeks and noticed lots of bad design in the hotel rooms.

1. a shallow basin on top of bathroom counter that encourages splashing water outside the sink

2. because its a basin on top of the counter it's impossible to clean well under it so it looks disgusting if you happen to look on top of the counter under the basin. Like if you happen to push a toothbrush under there (easy) you'll likely never want to use that toothbrush again after to see what it touched.

3. because it's shallow the overflow drain hole faces up meaning bending over to get a mouth full of water has you staring straight into a moldy yucky hole. A more normal deep, more vertical sink the overflow hole might be just as gross inside but it's hard to accidentally look inside it and get grossed out with your nose and mouth being 3-4 inches from the mold.

4. The mirror like surface of the bathroom counter shows a very clear reflection into the back of the mirror light which has tons of gross dust and mold.

Yea, don't design like a hotel room (eg, bad design)

Note: The hotel was not bad, especially for the current price which I'm guessing is a COVID price ($150-$200 a night). It's just interesting how much form over function the interior designer's choices were.

As for your comment in general, I like interesting UIs but I hate bad UIs more. 2 examples I've run into recently.

* Match.com, if you start editing your profile it pops up an overlay to edit. If you click anywhere outside that overlay you lose anything you had entered. I wanted to grab a piece of text and lost several minutes of work.

* Hinge. IIRC if you start entering something and switch away to another app for a moment you lose everything you started entering.

* I forgot which app it was but today I needed to copy a phone number but the app wouldn't let my select it.

* Shopify's phone number entry takes 10 characters. So if you type 123-555-1212 you get 123-555-12. If they don't want the dashes why not ignore them. Or better, allow them and just ignore them on the server. There's no good excuse for forcing the user to format a common form of number into some other format when the computer can do that for them.

My point is, I'd much rather UI designers start with some framework that supports known best practices and also learning what are best practices before just making some random new UI because they feel the need to be different (not saying Material Design is that)

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#117
post #75
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Material design is like the design of a typical hotel room. It aims to accommodate everyone. It aims to be a temporary home for everyone and a permanent home for no-one. Hardly anyone would actively choose to make such a clinical, impersonal, unopinionated environment their home. That's what happened with user interfaces when software ate the world – once the UI designers tried to reach everyone, be the place for eve…

I really enjoyed this comment. I wish new software was weird , I want software that looks bizarre , stuff that is almost nonsensical until you try to use it and realize it makes you feel good. Everything feels the same today because of hotel room design.

I say this unironically: you may enjoy Vim?

I enjoy Vim. It is opinionated (or its defaults are), and when you first encounter it, it makes you ask why anyone would design something this way ... but then all of a sudden you grok it and you realise that you want everything to be like this.

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#118

As an amateur painter and professional coder, I must say art and design are key to even my statistical analysis. The issue is the human reader of your product. You want to make their experience easy and pleasant, even if it's reading numerical analyses. Thus, I take very boring looking data and turn it into something that's possible to engage with easily. That's composition, design, detail oriented execution, many cr…

As a technical writer, that also applies to how you write and structure information. I spend a lot of time refining the documentation I write, because I've been the victim of poor documentation.

This goes hand in hand with a good design, good typography and quality code. The result is a website that answers your questions and makes you feel more confident about your goals.

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, this is one of the aspects of being a music producer I enjoy! Every plug-in feels like it’s designed to be inspire you. Let’s be honest, an EQ plugin is super basic in what it does to the sound yet we are blessed with dozens of different designs. It’s the same with any other effect or instrument! The designer's get to have a field day! It’s my biggest criticism of Ableton - they’re built in modu…

>It’s my biggest criticism of Ableton - they’re built in modules (not really plugins) are as bland as the whole DAW and don’t act like 3rd party plugins. This is one reason why I like Bitwig. It has fewer/inferior native devices compared to Ableton, but I like the UI/UX a lot more, and I almost exclusively use third-party plugins, anyway. Plus it has plugin isolation so a plugin crash won't crash the whole applicatio…

As a long time ableton user that awitched to Bitwig I think you are doing them a disservice by labeling their native devices as inferior. They are different, they are somewhat reduced, but every single internal plugin is incredibly versatile, especially in combination with the insane modulation capabilities Bitwig has. Granted: I still like my Fabfilter Q3 over Bitwigs EQ+, but I also earn money using just that tool for days at a time. If I had to use just Bitwigs internal devices for the rest of my days I wouldn't feel limited at all, something that I wouldn't be able to say about any other DAW I used (except maybe Renoise, which is a totally different concept however).

Re: Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

#120
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, I know at least 15 people who got some kind of art degree, they pefer to work brutal late-night shifts at a pizza shop or deliver food/drive Uber than take a spreadsheet jockey temp job, even if it pays 3x as much.

My experience is similar. I know a few who eventually have made the jump, especially once they saw someone close to them do it, but for the most part they've largely been unwilling to do anything that seems permanent/career-ish that isn't what they dreamed of. I get it and sympathize, to a point, but....

The idea that one's career must bring personal and spiritual fulfillment is one of the most damaging bits of propaganda fed to young people, I think.
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