Andy Clarke on the role of the visual designer

Andy Clarke on the role of the visual designer

• In: Uncategorized
• By: maxine
• July 26th, 2006

As I mentioned yesterday, Web Directions this year is all about looking outward to the future, while recognising and celebrating the evolution of our strong technological foundations. In this spirit we’ve asked our speakers to comment on the following open ended question.

“In the areas that interest you about the web, what has changed the most in the last couple of years, and what do you see changing most in the next couple?”

First up, the man otherwise known as Malarkey, Mr Andy Clarke, on the role of the visual designer.

As a visual designer with a strong interest in markup and CSS, over the last year it has been very interesting for me to visit with, and talk to other visual designers and developers and to try to understand how they percieve their role within modern web design.

In the early days designing for the web, a ‘web designer’ was a jack of all trades, a bit of design, a bit of code, a bit of Flash, maybe a bit of SEO knowledge all rolled into one. Today things are a little different, and specialisation and collaboration seem to have become the watch words.

Information architects organise data relationships, user-interface designers make decisions about how interfaces look and work, accessibility specialists advise not only on matters of code but also matters of look-and-feel. What seems to have been lost in this mix of new professionalism is what role the visual designer can play to add the most value.

It is true that with so many different areas of expertise impacting on visual layout or design for the web, that the role of the visual designer has sometimes been relegated to making things look pretty or adding a layer of gloss to the ’science’ of web design.

I hope that over the next few years that visual designers will once again be allowed to take their place as the lynch pins of a project as it is designers that are uniquely qualified to bring all of the various web design elements and specialties together and to give them a human quality - emotion.

I think visual designers on the web have copped a bit of a caning and marginalisation in the process of the maturation of the web, and that this is becoming increasingly unfair. From this person, to Michelangelo and Peter Saville visual designers created the cultural artefacts by which we represent ourselves and understand history. Can we lose this in the digital age?