How to hire designers

I&#x27;ve learned over the years as a creative director that there are just some clients who <i>get it</i> and some that don&#x27;t.<p>The clients who <i>do</i> get it will invite the design team to their production meetings; they&#x27;ll include us on key decisions (for example, &quot;should we have feature x?&quot;), and they&#x27;ll expect us to contribute to the overall product, NOT just in design, but also in functionality.<p>The clients that don&#x27;t get it? You get a stack of content and a list of demands, along with phrases (that we now use freely around the office) like &quot;jazz it up&quot; and &quot;make it more FUN!&quot; <i>Those</i> are the clients that think great designers are found on Dribbble and that my team always needs to be &quot;pushed&quot; to produce &quot;fun, exciting, INNOVATIVE&quot; design. In reality, we just take our effective, well-executed design and practically roll the dice to see which Dribbble style <i>du jour</i> we can slap on it.<p>So, in a kind of weird way, Dribbble makes my job a lot easier in terms of showing me how to make my work shittier so that it&#x27;s accepted by dumbass clients. For that, I am thankful.

Great post and a great follow up. I think dribbble&#x27;s co-founders intended the site to be a show and tell of <i>actual</i> work (pure speculation) but has become more of a showcase of flashy unrealistic photoshop designs.<p>I think the divide in the design industry is going to be short lived as companies start to realize that they don&#x27;t really need a a graphic designer, a product designer, a UI designer and a UX strategist. They need one (or several) competent designer that can understand all of these roles.<p>I wrote a short blog post discussing the issue: <a href="http://generalist.io/designers-design" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;generalist.io&#x2F;designers-design</a>

The post is a bit misleading about PS monkeys. There are actually jobs out their that specialize in image production (e.g. Doing lots of red lining); or even producing grid layouts. Production really isn&#x27;t design, but often junior visual designers are tasked with doing it (or even senior ones...because someone has to do it). Large organizations will hire people specifically for these roles who aren&#x27;t really designers.<p>Interaction and visual design roles are separated not because the division is natural, but because visual and interaction design require specific skills that are rare to find both in individuals, especially on the visual side (interaction designers have diverse backgrounds, while visual designers require specific training).

<i>design was not about how something looks, but how it works.</i><p>One of the worst things for me as a developer is having deal with &quot;designers&quot; who don&#x27;t know this. They think they produce a flashy looking mockup and then they&#x27;re done. I&#x27;ve dealt with design or marketing companies who literally produce a few PSDs and say, &quot;This should do something cool when you click on it.&quot; Which then makes me the designer. Which, I mean, I&#x27;m flattered, but that&#x27;s probably not the situation the client intended to be in.

This post says some obvious (but good and valid) stuff but doesn&#x27;t propose a solution. Images almost by definition showcase visual design not other types of design. Images are a incredibly convenient medium to produce and transmit. Nice visual design can be digested and appreciated nearly instantly. Hence image-oriented design showcases are at the center of the zeitguest of app design.<p>Come up with a low-friction, high-speed way to share other facets of design, like interaction and information hierarchies, and then the macro-discussion will reach further into those areas. Currently the best medium for this is launching a prototype in an app store or web and publishing it around. You can see how this compares to &quot;uploading a png&quot; to understand the downstream effects.

Oh my god. I cannot upvote this article enough. So many times in my office, my job as a Designer (with a capital D) is dismissively referred to as &quot;making things pretty&quot;.<p>&quot;Hey man, can you add a little design flair to this?&quot;<p>Fuck that shit. Our job is more than &quot;make things pretty&quot;. Designers should have input on every step in the product cycle, not slap a coat of paint on a project that wasn&#x27;t designed properly from the beginning.<p>I&#x27;ve been asked numerous times to fix this or that interface, and implement said design changes (since I&#x27;m also a developer). This requires me to set up a dev environment for said project, get fully caught up on the project, constraints, etc, then navigate my way through the code and actually make said changes (without breaking anything on the backend, because as a developer it&#x27;ll be my job to fix that too).<p>Going back and making a &quot;band-aid&quot; style fix can take almost an entire day, when it could have been a 5-minute discussion during the planning phase.<p>Oh, and to top it all off: our graphic artist sits in on those meetings.<p>Apparently this is the norm.

So where was the advice about hiring designers? As far as I can tell the post should be titled &quot;Why not to hire designers based on dribbble&quot;. While it may be true, it really doesn&#x27;t help those of us not in the field who are looking to bring in talent.

This article diversified what I thought a good designer was. I always thought that a designer should be able to find the right font, design, colour and icons for a project.<p>Looking further into it there are a lot more to consider and more important points such as UX and interaction. I agree that UX and interaction is important but didn&#x27;t realise it is that highly rated.

&quot;This is about design education, and above all else, the idea that design is fundamentally about how something works, not how it looks.&quot; This cannot be said enough. Much like when you have to relearn how to see the world while learning to draw, you have to relearn how to think about problems while learning to design.<p>Do not confuse graphic arts or even graphic design with product design.

To put it simple and generalize a little bit, every function in a team ideally has good understanding of what is supposed to be delivered as a whole and is equipped with that specialized skills set for that function. I have to say it&#x27;s not easy to have a team even close to this. But this is a correct direction. And each function has different weights in different product building processes.