Not a designer

I’m not a designer. Can I even talk about design? Why these articles?

Intellectual honesty is a thing, and that would forbid me from lecturing you about a field I do not professionally practice, especially when there are so many designers out there, actually doing that work, whom you could read instead. So, in that sense, no, I will not pretend that I can give out visual design advice here. I can’t. (You are reading an Inter-and-purple-links website.)

But all the same, design is a broad topic and there are aspects of it that I participate in (the intersection between design and programming, or whatever) because design touches everyone and I have thoughts about it that I think are more interesting than, say, SQL tutorials or my opinions about JavaScript; topics that would be more in my lane as a programmer with a blog.

On an expansive view, design is an activity that a lot of us do informally. There’s not only just professional graphic design. Planning the internals of things is design. Doing information architecture is design. Coming up with the way our own little side projects look and function is design. There are principles that apply across many of these activities. You might as well learn something about it, because you’re probably doing some of it anyway.

Design is the nexus between people and the built world we all inhabit. It’s the study of our relationship to that built world and the story of our participation in it, and I think that’s something anybody can weigh in on. I consider stuff like How Buildings Learn a book about design.

And in the narrow sense, a lot of us work with designers, and participate in the process of shaping designs so that they can best be translated to working artifacts. I think this is part of design too. Call it designer-adjacent, or something.

Whatever the case, design interests me and I respect the hell out of it, and I try to study it so that I can be better at my job, and better when I have to come up with my own UI. I’ll try to treat the subject with humility.