Ask HN: Why do designers have repugnant websites? Very weird unsightly fonts either too small or too large, ugly colors, and broken navigation making it nearly impossible to see their past work (which in any case tends to be presented as some weird artsy shit). |
> You've just arrived in a new town, seeking your fortune, and you need a haircut. In this town, there are two barbers. The first barber has a neat, dapper haircut. The second barber's haircut is grotesque Which barber do you want to cut your hair?
> Answer: You cleverly deduce that the first, well-groomed barber couldn't possibly cut his own hair; therefore, he must get his hair cut by the second barber. Thus, you correctly decide to patronize the second barbershop.
The sloppy designer is too busy making money from paying clients.
Disclaimer: over 90% of the websites I visit cram text into a narrow column, with too small to read fonts, often with gray text on a slightly darker gray or a white background, truly inane graphics at the top, and idiot nags. I use readability, or a print style sheet with almost all web pages.
And they acquire client work through repeat clients and word of mouth mostly. Generally, people who find you “in the phone book” are less likely to have good projects and are more likely to be shopping on price.
One good example are hollywood movies with budgets now in hundreds of millions of dollars and little limitations, ending up being total crap.
If you'd be an author and you would have no limits, you would never finish that manuscript.
And so on. Humans simply require boundaries, otherwise we go crazy. It's like with food, too much of a good thing turn into a bad thing.
And so to bring it back, if you are a graphic designer making your own portfolio, there is no client to put you in a box within which you have to operate. And so despite how much talent and skill you might have, the outcome will likely be quite bad.
Every junior designer will create a very clear website. And there's no harm in hiring junior designers if you want that. More experienced ones will try to annoy some to attract others.
I have no idea what's going on with https://stripe.dev for example. It's beautiful. There's a pointless fractal in the corner. The link to Stack Overflow is equally pointless. But in the end, I get the impression that Stripe does some precision shit which is what I want for a payment gateway.
Its much easier to do web design this way, its just software.
I'm not knocking it, it must suck to be a designer and end up having to do the same corporate looking stuff day after day.
Maybe it's Shoemaker's Children Syndrome.
As to why younger designers insert their busy selves in designs? I have a history of making tools. I learned early that good tools allow the user to think of the tool as an extension of the self. When you hammer a nail, you don't think about the hammer, you think about where the nail is (or maybe where your thumb is.) When you twist a wrench, you (hopefully) think about how much torque you're delivering, not about how finely crafted the wrench is.
But there is a school of thought that everything must be a delighter. You must make your tools so finely crafted your users can't ignore them. I blame Steve Jobs (or maybe people mis-interpreting Jobs exhortation to make insanely awesome products.). I think Jobs and Lowey and Issingler were talking about the experience of the artifact being awesome, not every visual aspect of the tool. If making something flashy detracts from the use of the tool... That's not insanely awesome, imho. But I think this is something you learn over time and you're rewarded at d-school for ostentatious demonstrations of design concepts.
In short ... There's a lot of bad design out there because there are a lot of insecure inexperienced designers out there who work cheap and customers who wouldn't know good design if it bit them on the ass. (Not that design frequently takes an ass biting form.)
And remember... If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb
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