Artists, shrug off that imposter syndrome – the tech world needs you

I think people underestimate how UI aesthetics actually improve user experience.<p>I remember when I was younger it was a lot easier to be more productive and creative with Pages, Numbers, Keynote than their competitors (this was when they were still skeuomorphic). The pretty UI genuinely motivated and inspired me, to an extent that I actually noticed. I really believe it helped start projects easier and work on them longer.<p>Still, you should <i>never</i> have flashiness sacrifice usability. Pages was a good example because Apple understood usability. I’m not arguing for excess animations, ugly contrasts, etc.<p>In fact, plenty of minimalist design <i>is</i> pretty while also being usable. Google Docs&#x2F;Slides&#x2F;Sheets in the browser, for example, are actually well designed. Material design without the shadows would still have all the usability with less flare, but nobody would build their website off of that. I think a lot of graphic designers who make minimalist designs, strive to make them pretty without even realizing

As an amateur painter and professional coder, I must say art and design are key to even my statistical analysis. The issue is the human reader of your product. You want to make their experience easy and pleasant, even if it&#x27;s reading numerical analyses. Thus, I take very boring looking data and turn it into something that&#x27;s possible to engage with easily. That&#x27;s composition, design, detail oriented execution, many crossovers between various creative fields.

So she lower the contrast and then gave a component a shadow where as none of the others have any 3D effect and are completely flat? It feels widely inconsistent to me and the message doesn’t hit right with me. There are people who train in graphic design that eventually become UI&#x2F;YX designers… which isn’t to say an artist couldn’t go that route, but this doesn’t seem like a particularly compelling example.

The title is a disaster.<p>It would only make sense if they are selling training services to artists to migrate to UI design, and they want to lower their self-esteem so that they actually pay them for the training.<p>Oh.

This article feels like a bit of a mess. It doesn’t really back up either of its two statements.<p>Imposter syndrome generally requires that you are&#x2F;were in the role that makes you feel like an imposter waiting to be found out.<p>There’s an interesting tie between UI&#x2F;design and a color principle. There’s recognition that an artist may find this gratifying and relevant. But, it’s a limited example not necessarily relevant to all visual artists. As a specific example, these guidelines could easily rolled into UI best practices and require no further input from color experts or artists.<p>What I was reminded of, was interfaces designed for visual interest with little concern for design principles: Winamp skins, Enlightenment window manager themes and Kai’s Power Tools (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mprove.de&#x2F;script&#x2F;99&#x2F;kai&#x2F;2Software.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mprove.de&#x2F;script&#x2F;99&#x2F;kai&#x2F;2Software.html</a>)

Regarding imposter syndrome: While I know that imposter syndrome is a real phenomenon that people experience, I think that it&#x27;s become some catch-all solution to the fact that many young people have not actually put in the practice to master their craft. The times in my life where I&#x27;ve felt &quot;imposter syndrome&quot;, it would go away after I had put in the work to get better at whatever subject&#x2F;hobby I was feeling like an imposter doing. This has led me to believe that the majority of people who are dealing with imposter syndrome are in fact just experiencing the perfectly normal discomfort of recognizing that they are not yet as competent in something as they would like to be.<p>I think this may be a result of the postmodern emphasis on subjectivity that has pervaded American culture for the past decade and a half. If your art sucks, which of the following options is easier on your ego? Saying people &quot;just don&#x27;t get it&quot; and that you&#x27;re suffering from a psychological condition, or that you just need to practice more?

Impostor syndrome is a prerequisite for getting a job these days. Companies only want to hire people who feel like frauds and investors like to invest in people who feel like fraud.<p>Since companies can&#x27;t actually advertise that they&#x27;re looking to hire fraudsters, they have to settle for the next closest thing: People who feel like frauds.

I&#x27;m not sure what it is, but something about the colour palette used in the examples shown feels a bit off to my untrained eyes.<p>Is there actually a job market for <i>pure</i> UI designers? I often see UI as only a small part of job description that involves other non-art-related technical skills.<p>It feels like the market is already saturated with people who can do UI design <i>and</i> a lot more (or the other way around for that matter). I am glad that the author managed to find internship as a UI designer and I&#x27;m aware that the author plans &quot;to extend into UX&quot;, but the emphasis on UI design as a career change for &quot;traditional&quot; artists sounds... dangerous.<p>Edit: removed confusing parenthetical.

As a practicing visual artist &#x2F; art school hippie who recently got into working as a software engineer I got really excited when I saw this, noted problems aside. But I wasn&#x27;t surprised to see it was limited to UI&#x2F;UX.<p>I&#x27;m having a really hard time finding other art school grads and visual artists working on the engineering side of tech and it&#x27;s starting to make me feel a little crazy.<p>Does anyone have any suggestions on how to find some other visual artists working as software engineers to connect with?

The work on reducing dark mode contrasts seems valid.. lots of dark mode is way too high contrast. It&#x27;s trendy, so I try it, and pretty immediately can feel the contrast messing with my eyes. So it gets turned off.<p>However I hate the ever increasing emphasis on design that doesn&#x27;t even care about actual usability. It&#x27;s all about the shapes and styling of elements and so much less on how all the components fit together, how the user moves through the application, etc..<p>I&#x27;ve been at this a while and used to be a UI guy, it feels like the balance of design:usability has shifted further towards design than at any other time since I&#x27;ve been using a computer. In places where there used to not be a &quot;designer&quot; flow and usability could end up being emphasized more than it is today. Today a designer sits there and restyles the widgets, in the past with no designer everyone else was happy to take the stock widgets and follow the design guidelines from MS or especially Apple. No thought on restyling widgets meant all the UI design time was on the usability.<p>Thankfully the project I work on right now has a good balance. Prior to our current UI designer we had a design-first person and it was kind of a disaster, stuff was getting restyled while UI requests from customers to fix usability issues were left to wither and die.

art is often a political choice to prioritize something above money. so its entirely antithetical to lots of people to do what your suggesting. though there&#x27;s always the urge to sell out to some degree. but this kinda shit comes off like a religious person telling you to join their religion. &quot;tech&quot; in its modern conception is more about money than anything, which often results in extremely lame stuff. you feel sorry for artists who are poor, but they might feel sorry for you because what you do is so lame.

I personally would rather that all artists stay far, far away from UI design <i>forever</i>, for the simple reason that they will never allow me to customize anything. It&#x27;s bad enough we&#x27;re stuck with the current bespoke &quot;light&quot; and &quot;dark&quot; modes in UIs that were fully customizable <i>in the fucking longlongago of the goddamned 90s</i>. Not to mention their propensity for form over function.<p>No thanks. Kindly fuck off.

Artists I know don&#x27;t want to be shacked by corporate structures rather than thinking that they are not smart&#x2F;capable enough.

The implications of the article suggest that there is a notion of ‘real art’. Our graphic designers are already real artists, so are our programmers.<p>So the guys and girls that know how to physically paint are <i>real artists</i>, and we need them show us the way? I think not.

Does this person even know any actual artists? Many of them would rather die than work in tech.

Within the context of contemporary art, UI design and artists are at complete odds with each other.<p>Afaik, contemporary art deliberately rejects art as a tool for expression of traditional aesthetics, utilitarian maximization or broad appeal to the untested eye. Commentary, metaphor and art as a reaction to other art is the norm. None of these trainings lend themselves well to UI Design which is fundamentally about aesthetics facilitating function.<p>IMO, architects would make for great UI designers, as it is another profession that mandates a level of function from the art. They also tend to be quite comfortable with complex software work due to common architectural tools. (a couple of my friends did make the architecture -&gt; UX design transition, and are quite happy)<p>Software engineers are famously stubborn when it comes to their aesthetics. One may say they&#x27;re sensitive to aesthetics. But IMO, it is more that they&#x27;re willing to put in a lot of time to learn abstruse interaction patterns and will defend them to death, irrespective of their general purpose appeal or intuitiveness. Git and Vim are amazing examples. Nothing against the tools. But if they needed widespread adoption from the populace then they&#x27;d be dead in the water on day 1. (They are amazing despite their terrible UX, not because of it)<p>I like to believe that I am quite sensitive to aesthetics and a well designed UI can elevate a mediocre tool to near unbeatable in their competition space. (The financial planning tool someone posted a few days ago on HN is a great example of UI&#x2F;UX done right)<p>_______<p>On another note:<p>Being an artist is also about status and class. Tech is the Noveau-Riche of this half-century. It is the lowest status thing you can be.<p>We see it all the time. Tech bros are the butt of every joke and their hobbies&#x2F;culture&#x2F;lifestyles are widely mocked. You never see the same level of disdain towards lawyers in DC or finance bros in NYC as you see for tech people in places like Seattle. It doesn&#x27;t help that the demographic is generally male, traditionally unattractive, nerdy and socially awkward. (This is slowly changing, but not quickly enough. The appeal of tech to a certain demographic also isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing. I will concede that very likely other professions have occupied this same chair in different eras)<p>The only company that manages to look cool to artists is Apple, and they are very careful about hiding that they are a tech company first, rather preferring to highlight themselves as a fashion company. (The fictionalized steve jobs founding myth also helps a lot)<p>_________<p>I would love to see more artists come into tech with a mindset of cooperation and good faith towards the community than disdain and disruption. Maybe we&#x27;ll see truly great UI design.

This article reminds me of people that say the eagles could have dropped the ring into Mordor.<p>The corporate world has spent the better part of a century convincing the populace that when one doesn&#x27;t work in cubes, &quot;people&quot; like artists, then they aren&#x27;t really doing their share.<p>And now, suddenly, the corporate state wants those people to prioritize their value as resources to the corporatocracy.<p>Much like the eagles from LOTR, some people don&#x27;t have any interest of your company, or IPO, or your disruption no matter how &quot;valuable&quot; they could be to some corporate bottom line.

This article title is kind of hilarious given that yesterday I learnt that Twitter is currently de-emphasizing the display of tweets with links to Patreon in them, thus making it harder for artists to grow their financial support.<p>The tech world will happily use our work to keep people scrolling their endless ad spigots, but the minute we ask people to leave and give some money to <i>us</i>? Nothing.<p>So come join the tech world, artists! Use your hard-won mastery of color, design, and form to help make a nice frame for some Corporate Memphis clip-art we got off a stock site! It&#x27;ll be great.

UI design is inherently a waste of time for artists.