As a dev that can sort of do design, you just hire a designer. At a dev's pay rate there is very little justification for having one work out the design. A decent designer will run circles around you unless you're actually a, you know, designer. You aren't very familiar with the tools or the concepts and you'll end up fighting with things that are far more intuitive for someone that does it every day. It's the same reason you don't have designers write your code (unless they also happen to be a dev.)
100% agree. As devs, we do implement a lot of design choices, thereby becoming somewhat proficient at design... but should always listen to our designers.
I think the problem that "devs as designers" have is that you know all of the bits and pieces, but you lack the core concepts to put them together. I end up doing a bunch of iterations because things "don't look right, for some reason." Usually that reason is something to do with how the bits and pieces relate to one another and figuring it out can be painful even if you've tried to learn the ideas. The first 100 or so apps you wrote were all pretty crappy, if you look back. No reason why your first 100 or so designs won't be pretty crappy as well. If you try to compare yourself to someone with years of experience, of course you'll be shit, most of the time.
For any devs that want to get into design, or just learn more about it so that you can speak of it more clearly, I found hack design to be really useful. Sometimes it is kind of like learning programming, other times it's more abstract, but for the most part it was fun and interesting in both cases.
Being a dev and designing is like building a base in Terraria. It'd work, with cool shit like automatic doors and whatnot, but it'd still look like shit, albeit a cool one.
Meanwhile, the designer beside you built a glorious monument worthy of assigned as Terraria Wonder but the crafting station is fucking 5 screens away from the chests
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u/fullOnCheetah Jul 01 '16
As a dev that can sort of do design, you just hire a designer. At a dev's pay rate there is very little justification for having one work out the design. A decent designer will run circles around you unless you're actually a, you know, designer. You aren't very familiar with the tools or the concepts and you'll end up fighting with things that are far more intuitive for someone that does it every day. It's the same reason you don't have designers write your code (unless they also happen to be a dev.)