I don’t want this blog to be one of the flame-war types, but this article which popped out in hacker news really bothered me.
Your resources are limited, and you need to streamline the work to keep the wheel turning. Anybody who’s not aligned with it is costing you time and money. Designers are no exception.
Pablo’s point is that a designer who cannot be another cog in your factory is not a good designer and should be fired. I say that’s linkbait bullshit (and yet I’m falling for it).
First, I think that designers should know pretty well the production medium they work on. A T-Shirt designer, for example, must know how silkscreening operates and a print designer should know everything about color separation and offset printing process.
So if you call yourself a web designer (not a graphic designer) then you should know your medium: HTML and CSS. This understanding of the medium will make you a better designer. It doesn’t mean that you have to actually *do everything yourself*.
Even if you are a skilled and hand-on designer always remember to set the scope right. Design is design. Programming is programming. They want HTML? Sure, that’s extra. Want you to learn their mystic markup conventions? Ok, but that would be an extra t00.
I was fooled like this back when I started consulting. I never said no because I was desperate for money and also wanted to show the world how smart and capable I was. Bad idea. I ended up doing the design, the illustrations, the coding, the PHP integration, and even the site copy for an ungrateful client that struggled to pay me $350.
We have a saying in Mexico for that: “Les das la mano y te agarran la pata”.
So, don’t let them do this to you. Set your scope from the beginning and if your clients can’t understand it, fire them.
