Unpopular Design Opinions That’ll Get Me Cancelled
Ah opinions, the best or worst thing you can see on the internet depending on how it submits to your confirmation bias.
Well, I am one of the most opinionated people you can ever encounter.
And surprisingly, I also happen to be a designer.
It’s just that I have learned to keep my mouth shut online (after being cyberbullied on Twitter), not like anybody needs to know what’s in my brain.
“An opinion is a strictly personal sentiment to which we grant the importance of a universal truth”
But I am running out of ideas to write about, and need views to generate leads and sales thus I’m milking a highly polarizing topic.
Hoping you guys won’t bully me in the comments for daring to have contrasting opinions ? you won’t right ?
AI designers aren’t real designers, they are prompt engineers
I mean, writing a bunch of words doesn’t make you a designer.
It’s we who are skilled enough to move pixels and think, that are the real designers. And even in the AI age, we’ll be the real designers.
The title “UI/UX Designer” isn’t terrible
See I get why many people want more descriptive titles because responsibilities differ vastly, but using this general title increases your visibility amongst clients.
And clients, aka the business people, don’t understand what a designer does.
They just want to hire a guy that will build them an app, or a website or do some user research, and they most often don’t know the difference between any of these.
Thus using the broad and general UI/UX term helps them (which is a great UX for them).
Learning just Figma is enough for the most part
I do 80% of my design tasks on Figma, and it’s all going fine.
It’s only recently that I started to learn Photoshop, Framer and AE to increase my software proficiency.
If you compromise on UI to focus on UX, your app is incomplete
Form is also a function, there I said it.
Sorry UX bros who think people will use an ugly looking app just because it has the greatest experience ever, even though humans judge a book by its cover.
Wireframing can save you hours, don’t skip it
When you don’t have any idea of what you’re going for, you’ll often find yourself mindlessly iterating for hours but to no avail.
You can also just drag and drop the UI components in place and speed up everything, which wouldn’t be the case if you were designing everything randomly without a wireframe.
Avoid design systems unless an app needs more than 60 screens
I really like making components, they are fun but often unnecessary.
Mostly just duplicating a few elements also works for such small scale projects.
Inter, SF Pro and Helvetica are great fonts
There is a reason why you will, to this day, find Inter on thousands of products.
And that’s because it works well, so does SF Pro for app store products and Helvetica for graphic design.
Stop the hate.
Jakob’s Law kills creativity
Just because another app did something a specific way, doesn’t mean your app needs to replicate it.
Are you implying your users are so naive they won’t be able to use your app if certain elements function differently than usual ?
Everything is subjective
What worked for them, won’t work for you — the context is almost always vastly different for every product.
It’s okay to hide your work from the internet
Not everyone wants their work to be visible online, and that’s okay.
Many of the best designers I know keep their work behind password protection. To each their own.
Now the final bomb that will get all the design overlords with 500 years of experience working at “the intersection of tech and art” fuming is…
UI Design is more challenging than UX Design
All UI designers can do UX very well, because to design a functional app you need to understand UX.
But not every UX designer can do visual design, mainly because they were never required to do it.
Hi there 👋🏻 I’m Sharanya — a freelance UI/UX designer writing about design here.
Check my free digital products over on my Gumroad.
You can find me on Twitter, Dribbble & LinkedIn or reach out directly via email for freelance projects!
