[shadowlight]

I feel UI designers are all imposters pretending that their job is some kind of ultra high value skill set. The UI designer is an important job but to compare it to a still life painting? Laughable.

Literally, that still life painting takes 1000x more skill to render than arranging text, pictures and geometric elements on a website. ANYONE can arrange these elements on a website in a pleasing way. It takes time and effort to consider the best way to arrange these elements but it doesn't take extraordinary talent to do this... anyone can do it.

Mind you there are some programmers that are really inept at all forms of "art" but this post isn't direct at those people. On average arranging text in a pleasing way is a trivial exercise. Adding this "color" and "depth" theory on top of it (there's no real science theory here) is just pretentious. Yes these "theories" are sort of applicable but at the same time "what just looks good" also works just as well.

[dang]

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27857458, which is obviously not acceptable here. We ban accounts that do that, so I've banned this one.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

[deltafourone]

Please don't shallowly ban people for no good reason. If you read that thread you posted my reaction to him was pretty reasonable. He told me to go study physics. A small violation of the rules? Yeah sure but did I incite anger? No. I was responding to his insult... hardly worth a ban.

Additionally who's to judge that is a shallow dismissal. YOU simply JUST don't agree with it. That's the main problem here. I WROTE reams of text to justify that dismissal. It is literally the OPPOSITE of shallow.

Is it a dismissal? Yes. It is an unpopular opinion? Yes. Is it a shallow dismissal? No. Are you incurring your own bias to ban me here? Absolutely Yes. The evidence is UTTERLY clear from my description above. If anything the one person who responded to my post had the most shallow reply. He literally dismissed most of the design content out on the internet as "garbage" with not even a sentence to support that assertion. That is the definition of Shallow.

And that is why I will always be creating accounts that will NEVER break HN's rules. These accounts will however ALWAYS break your own biased interpretation of your own rules. You are absolutely not a neutral arbiter here. You take sides and your bias here is on the side of considering UI to be artistry and you ban anyone who doesn't share your opinion by calling anyone who doesn't share it "shallow."

Take a look at the thread again. It wasn't insulting and it was FAR from shallow. You really piss me off Dang.

[nerdponx]

This is unbelievably arrogant. Where is your UI portfolio?

If UI design were easy, we wouldn't have garbage UIs all over the place.

[shadowlight]

Also unbelievably and unfortunately true. The arrogance of a statement has no bearing on truth. Keep your biases in check and examine the truth behind a statement rather then perceived arrogance. Look at https://www.google.com/.

It looks clean, and nice and well arranged.

Does it look like a work of pure talent and skill and a work of incredible skill and artistry? No. No it does not.

Sure google is probably paying some designer 200k to come up with that front page but seriously let's take a look at it from the perspective of reality. How much effort and talent is required to come up with that search page versus painting a still life painting? Let's face it: Not much talent, and not much effort either.

You can take it a notch up further and talk about complicated interfaces like gmail or outlook. For that I have to say that there's a lot of TIME involved in thinking through the placement and color coding of the interfaces. But is there talent? No. Anybody can spend the time to think about that stuff.

As for painting still life? Or the human figure from thin air? That's raw talent. Not many people can do that no matter how much time you give them. I also bet a good chunk of UI designers don't have the ability to even draw at that level.

Have you seen the netflix show Love, death, robots? The artistry in that show is amazing. I respect the people who work on those episodes. That is an example of modern artistry displaying pure talent and raw skill. UI designers in comparison? Imposters, most of them, and I'm not referring to the syndrome.

Also I'm not the one claiming I'm good at UI design. I'm calling out the imposters. Why don't you show me your portfolio and I'll give you my honest opinion on it. Good UI design is good UI but man you guys are not "artists" to the degree the people on that netflix show are actual artists.