The Snowths

From where I sit, this is what I see: the very best designers are leaving behind the work of actually doing design. Meanwhile, for younger and/or less managerially-minded designers, what I see is exactly the opposite: a preponderance of instructional writing and discussion, a preoccupation with tactical execution, a focus on tricks, tips and hacks. We have more than we could possibly want of sites that tell us how to do design; there’s always something new to learn, for sure, and that’s valuable, but a tally of available venues for discussing the why’s of design in this new medium adds up to a disappointingly paltry number.

I’d go so far as to say that the majority of the Web design field, by and large, is too easily motivated by technique, that the majority of us are thinking tactically far more often than we’re thinking strategically. And then, as Dan argues, we have a narrower but highly influential swath of designers who are dealing in the world of design ideas almost exclusively, who are billing at hourly rates so high that we couldn’t possibly be spending our days doing design when we could be spending them making clients feel better about design through sweet talk and PowerPoint.

What that leaves is an enormous and unfulfilled gap in the middle which, while it’s not entirely unoccupied, is sparsely populated. And that’s our problem. We don’t have enough designers who do both; we have a polarized industry right now, and the result, as Armin tactfully alludes to in his article, is that Web design is really boring. Sorry, but it’s true.