This.

I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy.

The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them.

Reality set in with my first client. Same thing, they didn't want cool shit, they just wanted their potential clients to find information about their work and contact them to hire them. After another 4-5 clients, I suddenly realized that web designers aren't some artist creating ultra cool, ultra rare stuff that your clients must absolutely have like a Banksy piece, they have more fundamental problems they're trying to solve and want you to solve them for them.

I got my ego checked in a hurry, but it was a good lesson to learn. You're not selling art, you're selling a solution to their problems.

It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to be edgy or whatever… most of people pay for having cookie cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good experience and they don’t want to be surprised on EDM event - well there are big names that can do whatever they want of course but that is different expectation.

The same with software devs that they think, it must be “framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there for 20 years” - well no if it is crud app most likely it will be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)

Wow, this couldn't be further from the truth. It might be true for DJs playing "main stage" style EDM (poppy mainstream music) but for most electronic subgenres – especially techno – the crowd absolutely expects the DJ to be a superb crate digger and pull out new and deep tracks they've never heard before.

No one goes to a techno club to hear rinsed tracks; they want the DJ to show them music they've never heard before. Before the digital age, people would go out to see touring DJs specifically for their collection of rare records that no one else had and you couldn't hear anywhere else. This is still true today in the more underground scenes. It's the opposite of cookie cutter.

Most DJs do not make their livings at techno clubs. The majority are hired to play bars and events that do not cater to particularly discerning audiences.

Exactly. The DJs that are innovative, crate digging, slightly pretentious music nerds are almost exclusively hobbyists, with a vanishingly tiny percentage of them being able to eek out a meagre living from it. The majority of full time DJs cater to mainstream audiences who absolutely do want to hear the same 50 - 100 tracks on rotation every time they go out. They want to dance and sing along to music that they're familiar with, and if the DJ doesn't play what they know then they won't dance, they won't stay, and the DJ won't remain employed.

It's actually very similar to web design - innovation has its place, but 99% of the time people want familiarity.

Source: spent a decade as a professional DJ

A typical DJ is allowed one weird song nobody has heard before. If it is a long show maybe one per hour. The rest better be songs the majority of people know and sign along with.

Yes, ideally played when the dance floor has been full for a while to encourage people to go to the bar and buy another drink.

You might have a bit of confirmation bias based on the particular environments you've been in.

Having taken part in various types of electronic music/art scenes since the early 2000's, I've met all kinds of people. Local hobbyist bedroom producers playing for free. Semi-professional artists juggling gigs&touring with one or more side jobs. Full-time DJ's playing everything from small underground parties to some of the biggest parties/festivals at the time. They all cater to their audience to varying degrees, mainstream or not.

Granted, the scenes I've bumped into tend to be on the non-mainstream side. That's where you can actually go professional being that "innovative, crate digging music nerd" you refer to (removed "slightly pretentious" because that hasn't been my experience). It's tough, but it can be done, and it's a larger group of people than you seem to think.

I've also met some professional DJ's that fully cater to the audience in the way you describe. Many of them make statements like yours like e.g. "99% of the time", "almost exclusively hobbyists", "slightly pretentious", etc. I really don't get why, because it's just not true, and it comes across as a bit defensive or passive-aggressive to be honest.

I mean, of course there is the mainstream audience of the type you describe. But even that audience changes its opinion about which 50-100 tracks they expect you to play on a regular basis. That change has to come from somewhere, otherwise they'd still demand disco tracks from the 70's. That somewhere is the stuff that hasn't gone mainstream yet, and while the percentage of people that can make a living of it is probably not very high, it's a lot higher than what you claim it to be.

That vast overlap between underground/alternative scenes and the mainstream is super interesting, and I'm pretty sure that if you included that part into your statistics, you'd see a different picture.

NB: I might have a bit of confirmation bias based on the particular environments I've been in ;)

> with a vanishingly tiny percentage of them being able to

eke. Yeah, really: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eke_out#English

> out a meagre living from it.

It's like the perfect conterexample, a good DJ needs to have really good taste and constantly listen to new tracks and think about where they can be used.

Designers everyone thinks are more creative than they are. DJs most people think are less creative than they need to be.

Sounds to me like they work out to be the same in this respect, only differing in perception. Both are solving problems with approximately similar levels of caching ideas and techniques and experience, while developing proficiency with similar quantities of tools. They're both generally making their money solving problems with all of that, only occasionally getting a chance to express themselves in some unusual artistic way that most likely won't be a viable income stream until they've really made a name for themselves; save for the rare circumstance they are Aphex Twin

I'm not sure how to phrase this in a way that complies with the spirit of HN (open to suggestions!) but that's a pretty American take on electronic music.

It's not necessiraly wrong, but it holds just as much for any other genre of music and the choice of "EDM" to make the point is pretty typical.

I am with you, let's get bashed as Euro-snobs.

I listen to electronic music for 25+ years, different genres and I never grokked what exactly is EDM. To me it's a vague hodgepodge of mainstream pruduction spanning anything from Guetta to Skrillex.

People around me who like electronic music refer to it as techno, house, dnb, psytrance, hardcore, what have you. There are crossovers and there are multi-genre festivals. But no one says "I am going to an EDM event tonight"

There's expectation that you will hear some classic hits but people expect to hear something new as well.

Edit: Wikipedia actually shines a light on the resurfacing of EDM "brand" in USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music#Termino...

That actually points to the problem I have with it. I don't think many jazz lovers would balk at reference to a performance as a "jazz performance" without a specification of which one of its subvariants (which by the way are far less numerous than EDM - compare here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_genres, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electronic_music_genre...). But in my experience, electronic music fans quite often feel compelled to endlessly nitpick over which subgenre some (almost always) 4/4, uptempo, 4 minute track belongs to.

It could be that I'm just not trained enough on other genres, but I'd argue that the differences are generally bigger, and the genres being much more numerous makes perfect sense. Because "Electronic [Dance] Music" just means that electronic instruments were used more prominently than any acoustic instruments. That says extremely little about the music. Whereas Jazz means something very specific.

To name three "Electronic Music" genres, if you compare Hardstyle vs UK Dubstep vs Tropical House, I'd say the difference is much bigger between any pair than "Nu Jazz" vs "New Orleans Jazz".

You can conveniently grow an opinion on this here: https://everynoise.com/

There are genres of electronic music that are like metal (very uptempo, in-your-face, maximalist) and ones that are like jazz (smooth, free-flowing, open, not maximalist). Both being very common and huge subgenres. But where's the jazz that sounds like metal or the metal that sounds like jazz? They might exist, but would be incredibly niche.

Besides, people nitpicking over subgenres exists in many genres. Metal (or really "Music featuring heavy electric guitars") is famous for it. But in both it's only a small minority of people who spends their time doing this, mostly teens or people online, very rarely people actually visiting and enjoying shows.

"Jazz" should be compared to "Techno". And people definitely go to "Techno" festivals, even though you can further divide it into "Hard techno", "Industrial techno" and so on.

Whoa there. I've not done the polling but I suspect most EDM consumers think of themselves as music lovers the same way other people like jazz etc. I tend more to agree with your assessment that the vast majority of it is not in the same category as "real" music but I don't think attendees of a rave would go along with that.

Do you have any examples of some "cool" sites that you designed, even prototypes? You piqued my interest.

When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed an architecture site for a local architect using the effect.

It was very similar to this site where you had jarring transitions, background changes and images moving at different speeds. https://doubble.group/sg/

The end result was very similar to site above and we all got a lot of positive feedback when their current clients saw it because they were blown away. While I was busy separating my shoulder patting myself on the back - we realized a few months in, the engagement was horrendous. The leads from their contact form dried up to almost nothing. Analytics showed an insane drop off from the home page. None of the internal pages were getting any traffic. We quickly realized that nobody could find any content on the site, they couldn't get to the contact page very easily, the content was hard to find and or read because of the motion and animation that constantly took your focus off of what you, as a user, were trying to do.

We had up for four months before having to pull it and put up their old site, then re-design another simple, more refined site that would work better for their users. It was a great lesson to learn about solving problems or trying to create something cool that nobody could use.

We also designed a site for a local event to support a women's shelter and used parallax again to tell a story of how women are shuffled through a system that does little to protect them from their ex-husbands or violent abusers.

It used the same techniques in this, where you had both horizontal and vertical scrolling in both directions to show a timeline and story with illustrations and infographics. https://collagestudio.ca/en

This also got a ton of good feedback and we had a few other non-profits approach us to do something similar for them and we did a few more using the same template we had, but switching some elements to make it original for each client. This worked out much better because if people were able to digest the story and the points you were trying to make, it had a better impact than new clients trying to find specific content and the contact page.

Hope that helps!

>When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed an architecture site for a local architect using the effect.

A friend of mine designed such a site with his web design company. I instantly thought, amazing but horrendous.

On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.

> On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.

Everything apart from the navigation bar at the top - which is well organised and static ( over-time ).

ie in terms of the functional 'find-stuff' part of the site - it's all there in the top few pixels(1), and the sub menus. The rest is entertainment.

(1) There is also a footer at the bottom of the scroll - with a whole host of simple links - if you get that far and haven't found what you are looking for.

I don't know anyone bought iPhone from their website, so this is not so important.

> On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.

IMO that's Apple being a high-fashion trend-setter rather than good UI/UX design.

The current choices of videos they auto-play actually give me motion sickness, which I don't normally get from video content.

> On that note, why is Apple still successful with this?

It is very possible that they are successfull despite their web design choices.

> On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.

Think of it more like a scroll controlled trailer and that the metric they might be working on it the longer a customer spends on the site the more likely they are to convert.

Reason I think it's this is their sites are mega long and information packed with everything moving these days.

They use their product landing pages as a commercial but you can see they make that top nav easy to get to buying it or tech specs.

Personally, I dislike scrolljacking but the other animated elements that come up in the viewport are pretty well-done. It's all ultra-sanitized and corporate but there's a lot of effort and finesse put into it.

Phone comparison landing pages:

https://www.apple.com/iphone-15-pro/

https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip6/

https://store.google.com/category/phones?pli=1&hl=en-US

The iPhone 15 Pro page is a good example, as soon as you click “Buy” or any other link on the top nav, the pages become much more conventional while still retaining a consistent and functional style. The dynamic scroll hacking stuff is only on the main marketing pages.

> The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them.

hmmm... That approach is anathema to every other UI designer or UX person I encountered in that field. The core of UI design is 100% about clarity-- letting the user focus on exactly what they need to solve their problem. The core guiding principle of UX work is designing based on empirical research, and then iterating based on user testing... even if it doesn't work out like that in practice, it's still laser-focused on helping the user achieve what they need.

Did you transfer into the field from a non-web-design background? The people I've seen approach web design with the intent of making some sexy website that's flashy for its own sake were a) front-end developers that thought the technical know-how was the hard part, b) branding and identity designers, or maybe print designers that never had to consider designs that people actually had to do stuff with, and c) small-org IT people that were sick of IT and were charged with maintaining the organization's website so they figured it would be an easy switch.

UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s. Every UI I see today shows that UX designers were not invited to have input.

>UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s.

But also back then, anyone could and did call themselves a UI/UX developer because it was trendy to do so and paid well. Most weren't actually good at it.

That's weird because the dozens of UI designers and also UX designers and researchers (UI design and UX Design are not the same thing) I know are employed doing exactly what they were trained to do. If you think UX was at an apex in the 90s, you haven't actually looked.

There are more today than the 90s for sure. However there are a lot more UIs around, and the big players don't give the UI and UX design people near as much control as they did then and so bad UI dominates. today's flat UI fad would not be allowed in the 90s.

Lots of developers think that. When you've got a working mental model of how software functions, generally, you interact with computers completely differently. Most people don't even think about 90% of the interfaces they use— from text messages to microwaves to ordering kiosks to car radios— specifically because UI design is light-years beyond what it was. You want to see what usability looks like without interface design? Look at FOSS... And guess how many non-developers use end-user-facing FOSS apps? What about big ones like Firefox and Blender and Signal? As in, the only ones that have any nontechnical user base? They're almost exclusively run by foundations that employee product designers and UI designers for their important features.

As much as developers like to imagine they're somehow experts on interface design because they've used so many interfaces and understand the tooling, empirical evidence points to the contrary. I worked as a developer for a decade before I moved to design, and I hate to say it, but damn near 100% of the confidently stated interface design knowledge among developers is because they haven't learned enough to get over the dunning-krueger peak, and echo chambers like this only reinforce that.

So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences pretending to be absolute statements.

Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed and "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-focused on clarity or efficiency of communication. It's only recent years where that has become such singular focus, and in turn has created a sentiment that UI and web/app experiences have lost their charm.

Many of the currently popular marketing site designers in the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design backgrounds, and they are popular because they design over-the-top big-text animation-filled websites that catch your eye.

The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether you were successful or not. But "user interface/experience" does not imply it HAS to be an efficient one. Some UI/UX is designed for delight and delight alone.

The person you are replying to got into the industry with the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had starting out. The people who approach it with your attitude have mostly been engineers. In the end most meet somewhere in a happy middle.

> So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences pretending to be absolute statements.

Well I've got a pretty recent design degree and have a lot of exposure to what people are thinking and how people are practicing in this field. If you've got some empirical evidence that challenges that, I'm happy to consider it.

> Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed and "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-focused on clarity or efficiency of communication.

Yes, I've been in the field for decades. For most of the internet's history, web design was done by "web people" and not designers. Additionally, lots of it has been done by visual designers and not interaction designers-- that yields very different results.

> It's only recent years where that has become such singular focus, and in turn has created a sentiment that UI and web/app experiences have lost their charm.

So where's your non-anecdotal support for this absolute statement?

> Many of the currently popular marketing site designers in the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design backgrounds, and they are popular because they design over-the-top big-text animation-filled websites that catch your eye.

Sorry, no. Most people who put marketing sites together come from advertising, which is almost exclusively filled with visual designers. There's nearly no reason for a marketing website to employ the services of either a UI designer or a UX designer. There are a lot of people-- as you can see in this comment section-- that call themselves UX designers that don't even realize how wrong they are. Just like there are lots of people who cargo-cult PHP snippets from tutorials that call themselves software developers, or even software engineers. Again, if you have any non-anecdotal evidence that says otherwise, I'm happy to look at it.

> The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether you were successful or not. But "user interface/experience" does not imply it HAS to be an efficient one. Some UI/UX is designed for delight and delight alone.

The fact that you say UI/UX is telling. While a UX designer may concern themselves with UI design, they are not even close to the same field. UX is about product design, overall. UI design is a communication discipline in the vein of HCI in which the goal is to communicate the functionality of a program to a user. While there are lots of colloquial misuses of these terms in companies that don't really focus on these things, any organization that has codified design practices and structured design roles that actually needs to define what these people actually do all day uses them correctly.

> The person you are replying to got into the industry with the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had starting out. The people who approach it with your attitude have mostly been engineers. In the end most meet somewhere in a happy middle.

I'm an art school trained designer having switched careers from web development. Most engineer types I've encountered call anyone that touches the front-end without coding a UI/UX designer, and think the purpose of design is aesthetic. I've had dozens of discussions on HN, specifically, with developers that think exactly that. Within the big UX organizations I've worked with and fellow UI designers, what I've said is the rule rather than the exception. Go and look at UX portfolios for people with professional experience in the field-- they're full of case studies, not visual design, and CERTAINLY not flashy visual design.

All of what I am saying is anecdotal observation of trends and behaviors, nothing objective or measurable, just like what you have been saying. I also have been in the industry since the era of table layouts and slices.

I bundle UI/UX together because that's what most design teams end up doing, both. In my experience only very large companies commit the resources to having dedicated UX research. It's only telling of the practical reality, not of my knowledge of UI or UX.

My point is that there is no universal "purpose" to design. Design is a practice that can be applied to a wide range of purposes, some more aesthetic, some more functional, and in all cases are struggled to be measured by subjective or objective means.

The popular designers I refer to are not from advertising backgrounds. They are all "design engineers" who make things that stand out from the rest because they can actually produce their work and thus are capable of way more than the crazy limitations Figma or other design tools put on us. The trend amongst tech startups has been landing pages that follow the aesthetics of companies like Linear and Stripe. Whether or not they are functional, they stand out because they are flashy.

In UI you want to be anything but original. It should be as “the same” as possible.

Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours. So to the extent that originality means diverging from those expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing your users a disservice, by not letting them leverage the expectations and muscle memory they already have. Building on paradigms that others have established as the norm means meeting users where they are.

Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."

As a concrete example, the idea of a mouse was once counterintuitive to users because they'd never seen one before.

Windows included Solitaire with the OS in part to introduce ideas like "click" or "click and drag" to users that were unfamiliar with GUIs, by linking them to physical concepts users did understand ("oh, I have a physical card, I can grab it and move it around, that makes sense!").

Wow that’s cool. I remember my dad was addicted to solitaire lol

He was playing the tutorial all along.

> was once...

...and is rapidly becoming so again, hence modern UIs treating it as a second-class citizen.

Applies to other things like music too. Sometimes people are ahead of their time and most people can't digest it.

While it makes sense, it really isn't the case if the market leaders have shitty design principles.

Apple stopped bundling an iPhone charger on recent models. Samsung did the same, but realized the backlash was enormous, and offered the charger for free (instead of being an additional purchase) if you bought a recent model.

Same with headphone jack, although it was received much more negatively and I'm pretty sure Samsung didn't give a damn about most of its users complaining they now had to buy new headphones (they mitigated this a bit by offering a USB-C headphone on their flagship devices for a while) to listen to music in their devices.

It's an outdated line of thought to think you need your designs to feel familiar to the user, even if the competitors have dark or annoying design patterns, rather than convenient. The average user is no longer a tech illiterate person. We should stop assuming common things like opting out of marketing/AI data training should be left for advanced users only and make it available for everyone, with ease.

I don't think you are quite talking about the same kind of design here.

You are talking about very high level choices. (Do we bundle a charger with every new phone? does the phone have a jack?) Those are not really good examples where familiarity is important.

The argument about the importance of familiarity is in the UX paradigm of the phone. Think about the task of pairing a phone with a wifi network. You usually do that by unlocking the phone, finding the settings (which is most likely under an icon resembling a gear, or a spanner, even though neither of those things had anything to do with setting up wifi). Then inside the settings you have a long list of things you can set, you can move between them by dragging the screen up and down. You find the menu item for wifi (probably has a wifi logo, or radio waves icon) you click that. Then you see something where you can turn the wifi radio on or off, and you see a list of SSID's you can join. You click the one you want to join, and it asks you for the password associated with the network. Usually you can tap the password field and an on-screen keyboard appears where you can type the password in.

This is by and far the way to connect to a wifi on any modern smart phones. This is the "familiar".

To better illustrate what "lack of familiarity" would mean imagine a phone where instead of finding the wifi settings in a "settings" menu you can connect to a new wifi in the maps app. Why? Wifi networks are location dependent, so why not? These designers decided that wifi networks appear as small colourful dots on the map. Then imagine if after tapping your selection from the list of SSID's you would need to push a button on the side of the phone to "accept" it. Otherwise it won't connect. Then imagine that instead of showing you an on-screen keyboard to type in the password you need to morse-code tap the password in by tapping the back of the phone. The phone would indicate this to you by showing an icon of a drum kit.

This is what "lack of familiarity" would look like. Clearly this imaginary phone would be very hard to use, and the users would reward the manufacturer's creative thinking with a lot of returns and complaints.

Another example of this: when I bought my current phone it took me well over a week to figure out how to put it on silent, because the option to do it is no longer on the control panel you sweep down from the top of the screen.

No, now I have to actually adjust the volume to make the volume indicator / slider pop up, and then the mute button is visible.

If the volume slider was accesible through the regular on-screen interface, I might have looked for a mute button alongside it. But pressing the volume up / down buttons didn't occur to me, because those buttons are for nudging the volume one step in either direction, not for making hidden UI elements appear.

Aha, you too have a OnePlus? :-)

AFAICR, it took me much longer than a week.

I understand, I couldn't scratch my head to think of dark design patterns done by big companies nowadays when it comes to UX. One thing I can think of is how Samsung keeps moving away common settings from Android to new menus in new One UI versions. I remember when I updated to Android 14 and I just couldn't find where to configure my battery charger settings.

> The average user is no longer a tech illiterate person.

On the contrary, I think the average user is nowadays a much more tech illiterate person than they used to be.

Design is about navigating ambiguity, and finding which fine lines to walk when resolving tensions inherent to opposing constraints in any sufficiently complex problem space. There is rarely a single best solution to such problems.

Originality certainly has a role to play in there - many (most?) iconic products were strikingly original. Would the iPod have been a better designed product with a D-pad (or other standard button arrangement) over its scrollwheel? Or the Wii with a standard gamepad?

Originality and novelty (particularly when it comes to visual aesthetics) are forces people respond to, and great designers know how to channel those forces in constructive ways for their work.

> Or the Wii with a standard gamepad?

Or the 3DS without the 3D?[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_2DS

Maybe even if you copy and reuse virtually everything the composition can be original if you are not just applying the latest trends blindly because it's shiny and new. I come from IT architecture and for me this is the best transposition of originality for the concept of "there is no silver bullet". Do you think this also counts as originality?

I guess it's original if it's not been done exactly the same before. But my point is that originality isn't what designers should be going for 99% of the time, even if it's a side effect. I'm sure that you follow patterns and conventions when designing an IT architecture: the combination of individual patterns you end up using, even if they've been used a million times before, still constitute a solution to the specific problem in front of you. They may be "original" in some sense, but that's beside the point: you're not aiming for originality, you're just trying to deliver whatever the best infrastructure or network architecture is for that particular usage. That's what design is, and indeed that activity itself meets all my criteria for being a design activity.

Sure, there are books like Software Architecture the hard parts and even the well architected framework from AWS but they only indicate possible ways to investigate problem domains, design solutions and test and validate implementations, but it's all context dependent

Even an artist as to meet something that can resonate within its public to be called thus, otherwise the person might be creative but lake the social dimension which is a preponderant trait of any artistic practice. Much like the difference between creating a language of your own for exclusive usage in your diary and creating a language enshrined in some literature work like Tolkien did.

> If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer.

Copying is the way art works as well (at least for those who are not doing super-edgy-fine-art).

Typical journey of a digital painter:

1. Refuse to copy. Refuse to even look at references.

2. Hoard references. Over reference.

3. Copy in the right way.

Music isn't very different either. A common recommendation is to first learn to play songs you like, and then to start diverging a bit and to adjust the things you don't like and merge the ideas you like later on.

As a former professional designer (and current improvisational musician( myself I would even come at it from the other direction: There is no true originality to begin with. Everything you do borrows from somewhere else, except maybe the things you do by accident.

But there is still a difference between a designer who blatantly slaps an existing aesthetic onto your project and a designer who tries to come up with a suitable look from first principles.

Design isn't styling, it is the visual organization of information with styling. So unless your information is the same the outcome will differ anyways.

There's a full time design team where I work. The menu items got decided before they all got hired.

What they do is to move them around every few months, change the colours, design our application with a mobile layout, despite 99% of our users being on desktop computers…

they need to be punched in the face!

Designers that change up the UI just to have something to do drive me nuts! And, now it's life threatening because cars now get updates every ~12 months where some designers have decided how to use the car changes. So, things you got used to suddenly change and you have to figure them out WHILE YOU'RE DRIVING!

I hope someone manages to sue over these changes when someone inevitably dies, so they'll be some pressure not to make them.

I still think cars need to be controlled through hardware knobs. At least all the normal car functions.

GPS and AndroidAuto/Apple CarPlay interaction should be the one exception, but even here you need a volume knob at least, so that if the volume is suddenly too high you can react with muscle memory.

Because surprisingly high volume can distract you enough to crash.

Missing the mark in terms of aligning with user needs

Keep in mind that the design team usually doesn't just make up work items, somebody is telling them to work on some product area. That somebody could be a product manager, or somebody higher up. Presumably there's a reason for them to be working on those things, and it's related to creating some sort of value for users and the company. If not, there just won't be a design team there for long.

Well if they have no tasks they will create some like "improve xxx". You don't want to be without tasks for too long…

>design our application with a mobile layout, despite 99% of our users being on desktop computers

And without a mobile layout before, I wonder why?

It's bonkers that not everyone is on board with responsive design being table stakes in 2024.

I am so sorry I saw this comment too late to downvote it.

> What [the full time design team] do is to move [the menu items] around every few months

Poor fuckers probably don't even know that there is a standard -- CUA -- for what order those are supposed to be in: File, Edit, View ... Tools, Window(s), Help.

The interesting thing about design is that once you combine the good parts from preexisting approaches (not least because those are patterns familiar to users already), relevant first principles (visual hierarchy, legibility), forward thinking (sustainable architecture with flexibility in the right places), and the context of your specific circumstances and goals, you most likely will end up with something sufficiently original without making an extra effort in that direction—and, rather than being an artist’s whim, it would be true beauty arising from function.

I think true beauty in design arises from its function. It’s a beauty that serves a purpose, solves problems, and meets needs

In my experience, designers mistake web design with print design. Too often, the focus is on the UI rather than on the UX.

A common challenge in the design industry

At a company I used to work at, the head of design told me that artists work to establish their vision, and designers work to establish the audience's vision - something like that. Made a lot of sense to me!

It gives a profound distinction between the roles of artists and designers

Your distinction between designers and artists is particularly compelling. While artists have the freedom to prioritize personal expression and originality, designers usually balance creativity with functionality. Agree.

My sense (and I think this matches what you are saying) is that the best design is to make habits smoother and doing that often involves difficult engineering. We like to think about reasons and meaning and purpose and such but humans are primarily a collection of habits with rare changes in intent and a lot of correcting for stuff that doesn't go smoothly. The best design often becomes almost invisible because it just works, but it takes a lot of design effort and engineering for that to be possible. If you write down the differences between a great design and an ok design they can often sound entirely trivial but aren't if you think from the perspective of habits.

I recently found this really excellently designed grain bin from Masuda Kiribako:

https://kirihaco.shop-pro.jp/?pid=181616902

It looks nice but is fairly simple; if you haven't spent a bunch of time looking at available alternatives it might not look like anything special. Keeping grain away from insects and humidity and oxygen (and sometimes rodents, though I'm not sure how well this one would do in that case) while still being able to access it easily is not trivial. Plastic buckets work well and are cheap but don't look as nice and most lids are annoying (I suspect the lid on this one might possibly be a bit annoying as well but likely not as bad). Glass jars are nice to use but fragile and best for smaller amounts. Wood is particularly challenging due to the dimensional instability and they use a particular type of wood with something like eight years of preparation to make durable boxes. (I suspect the magnet on the scoop is pure marketing though, you can't even use it when refilling if you hook the lid on the edge which is the one time it would be really handy).

I think low latency is one of the things that makes software and websites feel really nice to use and is often overlooked.

Designers should feel the "need to be original", in the sense that every project is different, and can be looked at with fresh eyes.

Perhaps a project is 50% similar to existing project A, 45% similar to existing project B, and 5% novel. Finding this correct balance of copies of A and B, and finding a good solution to the novel part - this process feels "original" in many ways.

For some reason, I swapped the word designer with artist. Designers are artists first in my head. They adapt off the shelf solutions second.