Nidahas » Musings on design, web standards and free software from a Sri Lankan geek.

Web D, cooler than Web Design

2006.02.28

Web design has always been a bit less prestigious, less glamourous, and not quite tangible enough compared to Graphic design. Ours is a cheap medium, with very low barriers of entry (perhaps without which some people, like yours sincerely, wouldn’t be able to do it after all). It even shows in the resolution: 72dpi on screen vs. 300dpi on glossy art paper. Hell, after so much overuse even the very title “Web Designer” sounds cheap.

Obviously this makes us feel a bit inferior to the graphic kids, so there’s a tendency to inflate our egos through other means. Like coming up with sexy names to define the job. Information Architect, Front-end Architect, Digital Designer, User Experience Designer, Usability Engineer, Web Kaizen Specialist, and more recently, Cyberspace User Naturalisation Tactician (that does it. I’m a dead designer). Of course, there is a lot of specialization in the web industry, and some of those titles do make sense for a few specialists, but at this rate of self-labelling, those terms too are in danger of becoming cheap (ok, perhaps not the last one). Unfortunately, this is one of the more effective ways of telling the world that we too are important beings in this value chain.

Imagine my relief when I read Michael Beirut’s post “The Persistence of the Exotic Menial“. Apparently our graphic brothers too are having a few issues:

NextD, Stanford’s D-School…a pattern starts to emerge, and it involves the fourth letter of the alphabet. What better way to transcend the earthbound chains of traditional design by abstracting it to a single letter? Indeed, language is an especially vexing problem for the graphic designer. “Most business people — the ones that hire us — think that we are at the table to create the ‘look and feel,’” complain the proprietors of the website Beyond Graphic, in a nearly note-for-note reiteration of Caplan’s 25-year-old speech which blames the word “graphic” for our travails. “They see our work as decoration, a nice-to-have after the strategic thinking is performed. This is why graphic designers remain at the bottom of the communications chain — below advertising professionals, communication consultants, and marketing strategists.” Below ad guys: ick. The recommended solution appears to be the substitution of “communication design” for “graphic design.” Nice try, but a little behind the curve. More up-to-date is the American Institute of Graphic Arts, now officially known as “AIGA, the professional association for design,” leaving generations to come wondering what those four letters once represented. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future we can achieve the perfection of “AIGA, the professional association for D” and final victory over the dreary inhibitions of specificity can be declared once and for all.

Looks like they’ve found a cure for it too. Perhaps we should consider rebranding ourselves as practitioners of “Web D”.

Btw, Michael does say at the end:

In our quest for respect, designers spend a lot of time trying to muscle our way to center stage. Maybe we — and the world — would be better off if we spent less time worrying about the spotlight and more time worrying about all those people out there in the dark.

Permanent Link | Filed under: Design, Marketing, Thoughts

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