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If I didn't know better, I would have assumed that Rodney Dangerfield was a web designer. It seems that web designers get little to no respect and this panel was trying to take a stab at figuring out exactly why that is.
This panel was moderated by Jeff Zeldman and included panelists, Liz Danzico, Erin Kissane and Jason Santa Maria, all of Happy Cog, along with Douglas Bowman, Visual Design Lead at Google. First, Jeff polled the audience to get a feel for some of the ways that their organizations worked.
For example, the first question that was posed to the audience was who's in charge of their web development efforts. There was a smattering of responses that seemed all over the board - anything from IT to Marketing to Distribution to an actual "Web Division." One person shouted out "Sanitation," I'm pretty sure in jest.
When asked who they had to interact with daily, Doug pointed out that he works closely with Engineers, who as Liz Danzico noted, have a different vocabulary that doesn't include important design terms and concepts. Jason Santa Maria agreed and said that Engineers that he's worked with tend to see design as decoration, and expect to "slap" a design on after the mechanical functionality has been settled.
The question of whether one receives respect can be looked at as a task: reputation management. One aspect of reputation management which was drug onto the mat is Design Awards. Are these important? Or are they pointless? Jeff Zeldman was concerned that a recent award that he looked at didn't address layout and usability, but was, rather, content-focused, which really doesn't judge the work of a web designer. Liz Danzico said that she respects the tradition of awards, but fears that a lack of appropriate metrics renders most current awards in the category of web design useless. Jason Santa Maria stated that, in his opinion, using Flash is "cheating," as the web doesn't natively support fixed dimensions, which most technical design concepts rely on, but Flash forces dimensionality.
When Doug was asked about his experiences at Google, he said that it wasn't really that "Google" approached him, as much as a couple of people at Google said that he would be the person for a Visual Designer job there and he got considered among other candidates. He did get hired there, but Doug assured us that he is not the guy who decides single-handedly what Google will look like. Google is a very democratic workplace, where design is more a caucus than a dictatorship. Due to this fact, he has a hard time trying to get new technologies or design ideas incorporated into Google products - especially if there's any chance that it would adversely effect speed. Speed, it turns out, is the primary concern at Google, that trumps everything else. Doug, who used to be described as a "standardista," is trying to make changes in Google, a company that, for the sake of speed, doesn't use quotes in their HTML tags. I guess even in this, what would seem like a web designer's dream job, it's true...
...We don't get no respect... |