To be clear I wasn’t attacking you just using a statement you made to illustrate a point.
Nope you didn’t and it wasn’t directed at you.
Not really it’s just me trying to avoid having to write out title after potential title after potential title.
Agreed, never said it did. It’s labeling a group that can POTENTIALLY lead to others labeling someone back. Had it been expressed like you did above it would be less inflammatory.
Right, because you know me so well on a personal level.
Agreed if you’re talking about a purely professional service. But if you start talking down to people outside of your particular realm of expertise or act as though you are superior to them because you happen to be good at something that is completely un-related to what’s going on at the moment, That’s pretentious.
I believe that the very nature of the medium gives print designers more freedom than web designers. I work with both on a daily basis and while each individual is different, I find it particularly more difficult working with print designers. I’m not sure if that makes them more pretentious though.
My viewpoint is coming from the owner of a small business. My eye is always on the bottom line and the satisfaction of the client. Particularly when it comes to print designers I find them agonizing over the smallest of details such as the difference between using Adobe Garamond and Garamond. This small discrepancy may result in an hour of justification and a few hundred dollars out of the client’s pocket to purchase a new typeface. At the end of the day, the choice between these two typefaces has a negligent impact on the customers of the client. Anyone who isn’t a designer, and even some who are, would fail to notice the difference. The difference is so small that I could even argue that it would fail to produce a different subliminal effect on the customer.
Let’s look at that same situation from a web designers point of view. The choice is no longer relevant because Adobe Garamond isn’t a web-safe font and for that matter Garamond might not even be installed, hence an appropriate substitute will need to be selected. Web designers don’t have the luxury of making these choices because they need to design for multiple platforms and have a extremely limited set of options relative to print designers.
I can’t argue that one is more pretentious than the other but I will go on record saying that print designers tend to appear more finicky about their work - well, because they can where web designers can’t.
You stated it perfectly well. Print designers are trained to be nit picky and aloof of the cost element. It becomes second nature to them to be like that. It is an important aspect in print design, but that does not make them pretentious on the whole. And again, what is interpreted as pretentiousness might just be surety about their work. Designing can become quite esoteric and the design lingo that is used by designers/artists can sound off putting to the lay person.
As a designer on the web the print designer has to adapt, it is a totally different medium, flexible design is a must, full control falls by the wayside. The designer must work within this given reality/parameter and keep the control within a range. This is very hard for most print designers to adapt to and for many impossible, they trained themselves into a concrete.
I would recommend to all print designers who want to design for the web to at least learn the basics of coding, namely HTML and CSS, some javascript also. That way they have a much better understanding of the territory for which they need to design. I followed my own progression from being one of those up tight designers to one that is now capably to combine the two.
Some print designers might also become defensive about their work because they realize that they are fighting an uphill battle against what is happening. The print medium will always be with us in one form or another, but the designing for the web will not be done any longer by the print designers unless they adapt. And that is a prerequisite to working with coders. The advantage the print designer has over a coder who also designs is that the print designer has learned the principles of design and colors and understands them well.
Coders should also realize that most of the time they are not good designers because they do not have many years of visual designing under their belts. Obviously there are always people who can do both, but generally speaking coding and designing are two different disciplines. I liken this whole issue to engineering, what drives the car, and designing the shell where one sits in.
I do agree with you to a point, but developers are very different to designers, the development community is pretty split on the basis that there are those who are of the old philosophy of “code for myself and hype it up” (usually the commercial developers) but there’s a heavy break in the number of people leaning towards the open source philosophy of “share and help alike”. I come from a development background (software) and do know exactly what you mean, but the print and conventional design community just don’t have the kind of momentum the open source community has (in group collaboration). In web design (rather than development) we have places like this where everything fairly fluid in sharing and collaborating knowledge. I think it’s almost a case of being enlightened, I remember when web design was much alike design where apart from the odd code snippet there wasn’t much of a community effort in helping each other. But the industry has grown as a result of the more open nature that many designers and developers follow. I know loads of people in the industry who may not use forums like me (in sharing knowledge) but they happily give themselves in other ways. Social networking is partially responsible for this, the days where things were a “trade-secret” are slowly disappearing.
PS: I know about those CS snobs too who take an issue with self-taught people like me, but they don’t really have much of an argument these days. The state of web design in education is appalling (teaching out of date techniques) and by the time they leave University they have a degree but not much else (experience or relevant knowledge). I have a friend who used to mock self-taught individuals as he did his degree but once he left and found out how much deprecated knowledge he had been fed he was pretty fed up and angry about it. I’m not saying that education is a bad route, but self-taught individuals are much more acceptable than they used to be purely on the effort we put into ensuring our skills are relevant and current.
I wouldn’t say that’s always true, I know plenty of web designers (myself included to some extent) who agonize over every single element if it’s semantically correct, if the CSS is perfect and it it looks as pixel perfect as possible, while we may not have the neurotic leanings that some arty types suffer (though that will change now typography in web design is becoming big business), we certainly make up for it in being self-critical and suffering the perfectionist attitudes that some clients seem to think is possible (you know what I am talking about if you have had clients send you requests to fix minor things… thousands of them)
Why paint everyone in a certain profession with the same brush? That’s like saying all web designers are geeks. In any walk of life you will find people who think they know everything, but you will also find those who are down-to-earth, approachable and likeable.
Generalizations like your question promote stereotypes.
This kind of reminds me of Apple users that I know (nobody on SP, you are all elite!). Because as soon as they purchase their computer they mystically transformed into a know it all “Web Designer”, or “Graphics Designer”. Like putting on the 3 Wolf Moon T-Shirt, although that is a real mystical element in life, an Apple PC is not. I think people in general are constantly searching for value and meaning so we like to tag ourselves with any pretty title that can fit as soon as we think we know something.
My point isn’t that web designers are less OCD than print designers but rather that the toolbox for the web world is significantly limited compared to the print world. There are just some things that you can’t make happen (or can’t make happen within a reasonable budget) on the web that are a piece of cake in the print world.
I have always called myself a graphic designer because I like the idea that I can design in many mediums, not only the web. I realize this can seem elitist (and she agreed) to not embrace the moniker of “web designer”, but I’ve never been able to identify with it. That’s not to say I haven’t tried. Every time I’ve told someone I’m a “web designer”, the word “web” stuck while “designer” soared clear over their head. The outlander’s perception seemed to be that web design was more about building than designing.
I disagree, just because we don’t try to replicate print on the web (as it’s been proven not to work or be unsuitable) doesn’t mean that our toolbox is limited. Granted the web is suffering growth pains (due to browser and upgrade issues) however a well routined web designer who knows their languages could quite easily produce something of comparable quality. If anything the opposite is true, we have a MUCH grander ability to interact with our audience in ways that print designers could never emote through their work. After all, many web designers can do graphic design and multimedia authoring to supplement their coding skills.
Some people in general, designers or not are pretentious, but there is something that I have noted, that clients usually tend to think that design (print, web, film, tv, multimedia, etc…) is a very easy task, they don’t realize that we use different tools instead of Word or Excel. They think that if they “can do it” why it could be difficult? So if we try to explain how we work, using pencil, paper, computer, what software, etc., they start to think that we are pretentous and maybe charge some more just for make a few clicks on the computer. So I think designers are not pretentius, just because we are designers, but some people just see us that way.
I followed your link to graphic ha ha. At roughly $30 US/AU for a single issue of a magazine, the magazine is pretentious and would thus interview like-minded designers. $30 an issue for a magazine…now that’s a ha ha!
You’ve hit my point: anything on the web can be replicated in print exactly, but not everything in print can be replicated to the web.
I agree that the web can be interactive where print has physical limitations but this goes beyond the context of a designer. Generally, the interactive nature of a website is left at the discretion of the developer or at least teamwork between the developer and designer.
Why does $30 for a magazine make it pretentious? It’s based on the cost of generating the publication and the limited circulation. If they were charging $3000 for an issue then it would earn the label pretentious.
All magazines are financed by the advertisers. The field of graphics is not very huge, it is very specialized, so fewer advertisers than in magazines with content of pop stuff. $30 is not that much for a specialized magazine. The subscriber pays only a fraction of what the production of a magazine costs.
This is a very interesting discussion. As a graphic designer trying to transition to web design, I’ve found the sharing of information really closed. I do consider myself a perfectionist when it comes to my work, and that makes me a very frustrated web designer. But pretentiousness pervades on both sides. I had a Flash teacher who wouldn’t help me at all because I wasn’t a programmer. And I paid a lot of money to learn how!!
I agree that being trained in print gives a web designer a more informed background. And I agree that there are those clients out there who think anybody can be a print designer. I’ve even met clients who think anybody can be a web designer.
Sometimes pretentiousness is a defensive approach to those clients!
In my experience, the perceived “pretentiousness” between print and web designers stems more from an individuals stubbornness and the differences in work-style and technical knowledge. Along with all this comes the mindset of “I’m a professional print/web designer and web/print is similar enough so my knowledge should apply here too.”
I’ve received web layouts that are very ill-suited as websites, either in strange UI or simply just extremely image heavy, designed by print designers/marketing firms. Now on the web design/development side, we can usually make these designs work - though it might not be ideal - but when you tell the print designers that something should be changed they become sticks-in-the-mud and refuse to listen to the web professional.
This scenario could go both ways, no one is immune. But it seems that web designers trying to do print are more likely to realize their lack of know-how in whatever area (color separation for example) and seek help and advice.
On the opposite end are the print designers trying to design websites, and because almost everyone has had significant exposure to the web they end up making many assumptions about how their site will work without consulting a web professional in the process. And then they don’t like it when you advise that they change something.
[QUOTE=Hyperbolik;4484822]Why does $30 for a magazine make it pretentious? It’s based on the cost of generating the publication and the limited circulation. If they were charging $3000 for an issue then it would earn the label pretentious.[/QUOTE
Following your logic then $3000 an issue can’t be pretentious since the cost of generating the publication and the limited circulation would dictate the $3k per issue cost. So, according to you and the “guru” the cost of the magazine can never truly make it pretentious because of production costs and readership are the only factors determining cost.
But naturally all assertions of pretentiousness are subjective. Having perused the limited online offering of the magazine’s content I judge it to be pretentious at anything more than $3 an issue!
My original post was meant to be more tongue in cheek and since this thread isn’t about the market forces and economics of the magazine industry I digress.
But to the question of the OP, In general I don’t find designers to be pretentious, they are usually quite helpful and willing to share their tricks and work flow tips and give honest critiques of others work. I don’t find tutorials created by designers to be “them giving us a bit of their knowledge from on high” I see it as a sincere desire to teach others their particular technique(s) for accomplishing their work. I see it as no different than developers or programmers sharing code or their unique solutions.
