Will the designer become obsolete?
In this blog, I’d like to share my view on the changing role of the designer. With all the guidelines we have these days, making design faster and easier — is there still a role to play for the visual designer, or are we becoming obsolete?
History
First, let’s look at the history of visual design for the web. When I started working in the web design field back in 1998 we were inventing design on the spot. There were no clear guidelines, best practices, or anything like that — we invented the wheel whilst we were trying things. At that time your job title was likely to be ‘Multimedia Designer’ or ‘Developer’. You did not only create the design, you also developed the website.
A few years later Flash came along and basically offered a free canvas. No frames, full and complete freedom. Which we, of course, abused to create 10 MB intros for every website… Again, no clear guidelines — if you could imagine it, you could create it. Here the distinction between the visual designer and developer became more clear. There were two different roles: you were either a visual/motion designer or a developer.
After Flash was introduced the web went fast. Real fast. User experience became a thing and more guidelines and best practices were shared. Nowadays, we have grids, best practices, user testing, WCAG, design systems and so on. And you are likely to be a visual designer or a front-end developer.
In my previous post I complained a little bit that all designs are looking so much alike these days. One of the main reasons is that we’re using design systems, need to comply with WCAG, or follow other guidelines.
Nowadays
These days the request of many clients is to develop a design system to speed up their development or to be more consistent. Where a visual designer had to create every page in Photoshop in the past — we are now working towards a single online source of truth (and Photoshop is not the tool of choice anymore by the way). Instead of creating 25, 40, 50 or more pages with a team of designers — we’re moving towards the creation of just 5 to 10 pages. All other pages will be based on the design system and mostly created on the spot by a visual designer and front-end developer sitting right next to each other.
So, a ‘Visual Designer’ has to do less and becoming obsolete, right? Wrong!
Experimentation
Setting up a design system is not an easy task. Sure, you could take a look at material design or any existing design system and build something similar. But how would you make sure the design would still feel like it’s yours — and not like everyone else’s?
The thing that is missing in the current process is experimentation. In the past, that’s where the designers excelled. Especially during the Flash era with the free canvas — experimentation ruled the world. Most awards being won on the web were won by those who dared to be different, by those who experimented.
Nowadays, if you’re lucky, you get a sprint 0 to explore and experiment. That gives you two or possibly three weeks for all the experimentation. First, you’ll need to make yourself aware of the brand of the client and do a proper deep-dive — meaning you just get a few days for experimentation.
So, what can we do?
The role of the ‘Visual Designer’ as we knew it will be gone. If you’re still designing 50 screens, you’re most likely not very effective as a designer. You’ll also really quickly lose consistency, because with that many pages — mistakes will be made.
So what can we do to become more effective designers?
- Fight for experimentation
Working agile or in a scrum team sounds really great — but fight for your right to experiment. Make sure that the team is aware of your task and that it is not only to dive into the brand guidelines or purpose of the client — you also want to experiment to find out how you and the team can really help the client. - Research
This may sound odd, but make sure you do your research. Especially, when you’re working on a design system people will ask you to come up with components. Make sure to understand the purpose of the component or the goal the team wants to achieve. For instance: many times a carousel is used just to please stakeholders — while research shows users scroll through and don’t see all the slides. - Broaden your knowledge
Make sure you can do more than just visual design. Broaden your skillset. Typography is one of the elements of visual design — so share your knowledge on content with the client. Share best practices in UX or show your motion skills. Sticking just to visual design could not work out for you in the future. - Be communicative
The single, most important aspect of your job is to communicate. Design is all about communication — listening to people and speaking up about your view. By starting discussions you’ll learn most. Especially, talk to ‘your’ developers. Together you can create the magic. - Create clear guidelines
Make sure you set the rules. Sure, the technical team might push you to use a Bootstrap grid or want to use Storybook for the design system — but make sure you set the rules for the visual and UX design. Let me give you an example of a recent setup I created for a client. Here you can see I challenged a team of designers to look at every component from three angles: user, interface and experience.
So, the obsolete designer…
Obviously, the designer won’t be obsolete. In the words of Steve Jobs “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”. The goal of this blog is to inspire and show that we, designers, should do more than just decide what a website or an app looks like. Don’t stick to your way of working only — make sure to understand how the world is changing and how you can adapt.
If we are asked to design less, let’s make that design count more. Don’t settle and become a one-trick pony. That will work for a certain amount of time or projects, but at one point your role will change. Like it has in the past. I am very happy to have lived in an era where we had to code and design, the era where we had a blank canvas, and now the era of all these regulations and guidelines.
The regulations and guidelines help make the experiences we create available to all. But there’s no better feeling than finding the boundaries of what is possible. Try to treat your next design like that blank canvas and experiment.
Sources
In case you want to know more on Visual Design and read on: here are 5 blogs about the elements of visual design: color, typography, shapes, pictures
and motion. I also once before wrote about AI and Visual Design.
This article featured comments on design systems; last year I have contributed to this free book by Idean called “Hack the Design System”.
Many thanks to Gritt Hoffmann for reviewing this article and thinking out loud with me.
Hope you liked the article and feel free to contact me if you have a question or you want to discuss a topic.
