Unfounded Anger

In the design community there often seems to be this need, or this want to immediately critique a design. Critique might be too kind of a word, it’s more of a hate on a design. To immediately call something out as terrible, wrong, ridiculous, stupid or just plain dumb. In offices I’ve worked in I often hear people immediately yell out that something is “clowntown” or laugh about how terrible a design is or how horrendous a drop shadow might be.

It’s not just limited to the office, online people are abhorring some new redesign, or how some small design tweak on a site is ruining everything.

This makes me sad.

It’s also not helpful to the community or design in general. I’ve been trying to figure out why web designers as group do this so often. My hypotheses so far:

1. Immaturity. Our profession is still very, very young and people in it our often very young. Few have had formal design training, and even fewer in a university setting and the ones that have often aren’t the really talented web designers out there. Our profession is so new that the pioneers didn’t have classes to take, and so haven’t had any formal training. Which, in turn, means they haven’t spent much time in any formal critique settings. Critiquing when the end result is positive is fantastic and a critical piece of the design process, but calling something out as stupid just because you’re angry isn’t.

2. Speed of delivery. Twitter, Facebook and blogging all give us the tools to immediately call someone out and blast it to 100, 1,000 or even 10,000+ people in just a few seconds. The speed at which you can say something is shocking so take a little more time to be clear.

3. A desire to seem intelligent or thoughtful about design. It’s the thinking that if you talk louder than the person next to you you’re going to come off smarter than the next guy. I don’t think most people do this consciously, but designers want their voices heard and they want to prove that they know what they’re talking about. It’s quicker to hate on a design picking out all the little things that should have been done than to just do something great yourself.

To be clear, it’s not actual design critique that’s a problem, it’s the quick comments and tweets that do more harm than good. I just don’t see how sending out hasty rants and complaints help us as a community create better designs. We’re just coming off as whiny and not solving any problems.

Instead we should be raising the level of debate in our community to produce and talk about designs at a higher level.

How can we do this?

1. Tweak before you speak. Just a small rephrasing of a remark about some new redesign can make a huge difference. Turn “OMG what the hell were they thinking with this site. Total fucking clowntown!” into something like “Looks like they missed their audience completely site feels bland a bit undersaturated and the type just doesn’t quite fit.”

2. Know your radius. You’ve got 20,000 followers, know that you’re going to blast a huge amount of people who respect your point of view. Be sure you’re clear and aren’t firing off without considering the impact it’ll have to the community.

3. Stop loving the sensational. Our community loves to jump on the bandwagon of something sensational. When Jason Fried publicly rails on Get Satisfaction or Merlin Mann’s enraged about Twit Shirt or John Gruber writes about the Apple’s app store people love to pile on. We place too much emphasis on the negative, the sensational, the bad, and not on conversations that help everyone get better. Imagine what great work people would be doing if they weren’t a bit afraid of the community jumping out and hating on them for something. Imagine if all of these “followers” were creators. Instead of getting caught up in the next mob lynching, they were busy creating something they truly love for us all to use.

I’m not looking to be a hall monitor, or suggesting that people shouldn’t be angry from time to time, but right now, at this stage in web design’s evolution, we’ve swung too far away from a positive discussion.

Let’s raise the level of debate and critique across the web, not just to be nice or to feel good about design, but because in the end it’ll produce better design by everyone.