I think the underlying, unstated point - that the industry is disrupted - holds, but misses out on a bigger, more interesting point: There is a huge need and opportunity to help craft the total experience, and those skills are costly and go way beyond what you can get at the budget freelance sites.<p>I can guarantee you that neither Foursquare nor Zappos used a $500 stock or contest design, and I'd bet even money that MyTown, so deeply derided, spent more on design and art than either of those (not including salaried employees).<p>There's been undercutting forces in design for years. A decade ago a penny-pinching retailer picked a punk high school kid to do his website (disclosure: I was the kid) to save a few bucks and got a servicable if uneven product. Today he'd do 99designs and get the same. Real designers learn how to create, communicate and sell their value in tangible ways.
I think the author misses the point of what a really good web designer does. Most of the websites you visit probably don't exhibit award winning visual design, but I bet a lot of thought still went into the design of the user experience.<p>Certainly Google's no winning any awards for the visual design of their homepage, but they released it in a time when every other search engine had a 'Portal' on their homepage. On yahoo, lycos, excite, etc. search was one of like 200 modules on the page. It actually probably took some unique thinking and design for google to say "Let's make search the only the on the page."<p>You can certainly buy a theme for $500, but that theme isn't going to be designed for the optimal user experience for interacting with whatever it is that makes your site unique.
Ok, I think we probably need new words.<p>Picking the perfect font, colors, making the perfect graphics is an important and in my opinion completely different task, than making finding products easy by for example reducing the number of clicks required and such<p>Let use Vim as an example, the design of the interaction between the author and text is completely separate from the colorscheme<p>Interaction design, is not the same as Look and feel design is not the same as graphic design<p>I notice that most of the time, we speak of all design categories collectively, which really hurt the debate<p>A good interaction designer is not necessarily the same person as a graphic designer
This sort of thing is weird to me. I don't have a problem with these services, but the whole "this changes everything" meme has got to stop. We've been through this every decade since, I imagine, the printing press. We still have designers, people still pay them, etc. People who don't appreciate or need designers insist that this makes them obsolete; they're almost certainly wrong.<p>I suspect that no one who says this sort of thing would actually hire a designer unless absolutely forced to. 99designs, et al simply replace the hapless employee whose incidental knowledge of graphic software would have otherwise put him in the uncomfortable position of building the website. It likely also saves some GD an annoying round of emails that go nowhere.<p>Both are thankful. Neither are hurt.
"you and I may understand [the importance of design], it doesn’t mean others do. Especially when they can point out success everywhere around them that goes against what we believe in."<p>That's a great point. I think the article ignores a lot and may even be a textbook example of confirmation bias, and I don't think the author understands what good designers do, or more worryingly, why an off the shelf theme couldn't have worked for say, Facebook or Google Maps.<p>But that one point above is worth taking away, and something designers should think long and hard about.<p>My own personal opinion is that you can't polish a turd. But when you polish a diamond, it's makes quartz look like shit.<p>Full disclosure: I'm a designer.
If you think that design is just about making a layout pretty you're missing a large chunk of what designers do.<p>Go ask Happy Cog what went into the redesign of Zappos and how much of it was just making the site "pretty" compared to the amount of time making it easy to find products and convert customers.<p>BTW linking to the websites of what are primarily mobile apps is pretty weak sauce.
So let me get this straight... just because good design is not the deciding factor to success, it makes it OK to settle for mediocrity?<p>Are you in this to make a quick buck, or to make a truly great product?