The Hybrid Designer has always existed...

A lot of empahsis is placed upon the idea of a 'Hybrid Designer' within the context of Web 2.0. Chris Messina, Kelly Goto, Richard MacManus and Jeremy Keith spent 50 minutes at the Web 2.0 conference talking about the hybrid designer and what s/he is and the problems we face.

They covered the issues pretty well. They spoke of the hybrid designer having a split brain, right for creativity and left for logic, a passion for solving problems and "rock-star" coding fingers (let's not forget Ginormous abs, either, which I am sorely lacking). Tools were mentioned (Ruby on Rails being one of them) and the necessity of 'View Source', which garnered ample applause.

All this is well and good and I have absolutely no complaints about this panel discussion. It was, in fact, one of the highlights of the Expo for me. It confirmed many of the things that I've been thinking for years. The idea of 'play' being a major focus of a hybrid designer, the idea that in order for you to succeed as a designer in any of the new media you need to be very versatile and that you need to speak the language of programmers. You may not have to spit out lines of code through your keyboard, but you do need to understand the concept as well as how a programmer understands things. And it doesn't hurt to know a bit of programming. That's why it's important for us, as designers, to be able to look under the hood and check out what's going on. In the end, it helps us.

But I've been thinking a bit further about the idea of hybrid design and that it has always existed in one way or another. The comfort of the cocoon that we, as designers have always had (that of being able to just design and go about our business) is gone - if it ever existed for many of us at all because I believe the hybrid designer has existed forever in one form or another. (Look at Leonardo, he was not only an artist, but an inventor, teacher and designer. Michelangelo was an architect, artist, designer, etc. You get the picture...) In fact, when I taught Typography and Computer Imaging I was continually telling my students that they had to be flexible in order to go out and get a job. The more versatile they became, the more the market would open up to them. Things had shifted, there was no longer a need for a specific type of designer (i.e. an illustrator, typographer or graphic designer) but that the new designer had to be someone who could do everything AND build a web site for their employer. My point in this is that once again we are going through another metamorphosis and that's fine. Flexibility is good. My concern is when does it stop? When will we ever be given the opportunity to focus on what it is we were born to do? That is create.

Some would say that the act of creation is in everything that a designer does, but then I ask what about the help wanted ad for a 'Web Designer' that requires someone who is an expert in: Photoshop, Illustrator, PHP, .NET, C#, CSS, HTML, XML, XHTML, Server Maintenance, Good Communication skills over the phone (i.e. some selling required) and must be creative. I realize that there is a need for people of this caliber, but it seems to me that the majority of these types of employers are specifically looking for one person to fill the void that should normally be filled by at least two, maybe three people. Don't get me wrong, there are some incredibly creative coders out there who are also excellent designers and even good salespersons, but the sky hasn't opened and we can't say "Hallelujia it's raining hybrid designers!" (sorry Weather Girls).

My second question is this: Besides being able to focus on being creative, what happens when the tools (and there are ton of them out there) begin to get in the way of the design process and then in the way of the creative process? (We'll talk more about creative process in a different blog.) In my experience, when tools get in the way, the quality of design and usability goes down. It has taken me many years to hit expert level in Photoshop and Illustrator and even today I am still find things within those two applications that surprise me. Some level of built-in functionality that I didn't know was there. Now we are experiencing the impact of Moore's Law at an even faster rate as designers and developers (obviously, Moore's Law applies to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit, but the concept also applies to technology in general). New tools to 'help' us in our work come out daily and each vendor says their tool is better than their competitors. This places us in a tremendous bind. We either stick with the tools that we know and fear becoming 'outdated' as a designer or we try the latest and greatest and do our best to keep up with the learning curves required for all of the wonderful new tools. Some of us try to find a happy medium, but are we ever really happy about medium?

In the end, we are required to be agile and flexible and some of us may be required to have ginormous abs (although requiring that may result in a lawsuit...) and we have to be okay with those things. But I think that we also need to be okay in the realization that many times, we can take a creative concept and utilize a pencil and some paper... two of the most elegant tools in our arsenal.