I’m going with…. Designer
Interesting post… http://www.drawar.com/articles/artist-designer-or-hack/160/
I like to think of myself as:
The Designer
The designer understands that he is there to do one thing and that is to solve problems. Rarely is there any glory in solving problems. You might spend 240 hours building a website only to watch users spend the five minutes needed on it and leave. It shouldn’t sting because if they leave completing the tasks they came to do then you have done your job and that is the satisfaction a designer gets.
At times there is praise for their work, but that is usually from other designers. Their best work is the stuff that goes unnoticed. Their best work gets out of the way and lets the user do what they need to do without complications. The invisible doesn’t get recognized because it is never seen (thank you Captain Obvious).
What is so hard for people to grasp about designers is their love for solving problems. People tend to think that designers like to create beautiful things (the artist), but they really want to create beautiful solutions. These people are very rare.
I personally find solving problems the most fulfilling aspect of web design, software development, and really anything tech’ish. You can slap together any solution, but there’s an art to putting together something that does it both elegantly and efficiently. Unfortunately, as the article author blatantly notes, there’s little glory in completing such endeavors – on many occasions I’ve tried to gloat to the wife about a self proclaimed masterpiece in C#, or web apps that made me crack a smile upon completion of again, my own brilliance (i would argue) – she laughs at me in pity and I realize then how alone I am in the world.
Thankfully, I’ve found a few online communities of like minded individuals that I can communicate with – work can on occasion moderately fill that void – but it would sure be nice to find some living breathing humans within my zipcode on the same level… maybe?
And just to be clear – I haven’t earned the title of designer in my opinion, yet at least. I have a long way to go before I can say that confidently. In all honesty I’m probably more a hybrid mix of 5 parts designer and 1 part hack/artist, trudging desperately away from the latter with hopes of learning to harness my own creativity far more than everyone else’s (ie freebies, tutorials, whatever). Sure, I can get caught up making things look pretty, or focusing on mastering new techniques, but I really do have an intense desire to understand why they work and how to improve upon them with my own style rather than simply pumping out copy cat designs. I guess ultimately I’d like to give back usable work full of value and originality.
Now that I’ve finished an undergrad in software engineering, I suppose it’s time to dig deeper into the fundamentals of design…
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