The argument is not that only designers can design, nor that everyone should design like a designer. It’s to not confuse shopping for or generating generic solutions with the activity of problem solving. Per Alexander, trivial problems, those that can be solved without balancing interactions between conflicting requirements, are not design problems. So, don’t worry and just pick what you need and like!
Presumably you care about the quality of your marketing. Otherwise why do it at all. Worst case scenario, your marketing turns people off to your music, who would have otherwise been listeners.
Actually there’s some interesting problems here because a huge part of music marketing is in a visual medium, like a poster or album cover. It is literally impossible to include a clip of your sound.
So you should be really interested in how to capture the “vibe” of your music in a visual medium.
But if you don’t care at all whether ppl actually listen to your music, then yeah you don’t have to deep dive.
"Actually there’s some interesting problems here because a huge part of music marketing is in a visual medium, like a poster or album cover. It is literally impossible to include a clip of your sound."
The term you are looking for is 'aesthetic'.
And indeed.. music is far more than just a sound or whatever simple thing one tries to boil it down to.
Im convinced many (especially here) really dislike that - they want it just be a case of typing in a few things in an LLM and bam... there you go. They have zero clue about the nature of the economy, what's really going on in various markets etc etc.
> I feel sorry for anyone that will think using tools equals doing design, because of the truly marvelous human experiences that they’ll miss, and that could never be replaced by the shallow pride of empty achievement.
What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?
I think maybe how you are conceptualizing design and how the GP meant it are not in agreement, and if you came to agreement on what it meant you wouldn't really disagree about the point either.
For example, I think design, as they mean it, could be described as "how to get that thing we care about". The correct amount of design depends on how exacting the outcome and outputs needs to be across different dimensions (how fast, how accurate, how easy to interpret, how easy to utilize as an input for some other system). For generalized things where there's not exacting standards for that, AI works well. For systems with exacting standards along one or more of those aspects, the process of design allows for the needed control and accuracy as the person or people doing the work are in a constant feedback loop and can dial in to what's needed. If you give up control of the inside of that loop, you lose the fine grained control required for even knowing how far you are away from theoretical maximums for those aspects.
Balancing requirements to achieve something you care about is doing design. I take that by “design” here you mean perhaps a particular interface or media, and you reckon that such element is not critical to your solution. If that’s the case then there’s no conflict at all. By reaching that conclusion you isolated what’s important and are correctly applying energy where it matters. This happens a lot in design, where producing or perfecting media interfaces is not necessary.
> what if you don't give a shit about design and it's a means to an end…
the parent's point is that it doesn't work that way. The point is self reinforcing. Design is not a thing. it's the earned scars from the process. Fine to disagree but it reinforces the point.
> What if you don’t give a shit about design and it’s a means to an end for a project that involves something different that you do care about?
Thank you for so succinctly demonstrating the problem with using AI for everything. You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you. Now you quickly and cheaply fill in the parts you don't personally care about with sawdust, and as this becomes normalized you deprive yourself and others from discovering that they care about the design part. You'll ship your thing now, and it'll be fine. The damage is delayed and externalized.
I won't advocate against use of new technology to make yourself more productive, but it's important to at least understand what you're losing.
> You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you.
You think most UI/UX designers, or the artists creating slop for content marketing spam factories for the past decades, cared? Some, maybe. Most probably had higher ambitions, but are doing what actually pays their bills.
It's similar to software developers. Most of those being paid to code couldn't care less, they're in there for the fat paycheck; everyone else mostly complains the work is boring or dumb (or worse), but once you have those skills, it makes no economic sense to switch careers (unless, of course, you're into management, or into playing the entrepreneurship roulette).
I think the more you industrialize a process, the more those involved become cogs (or get replaced with actual or metaphorical cogs in a machine). This is fine, even desirable, for anything we can produce en masse and apply quality control to. I do not mind that my rivets and screws are not artisanal. We figured out how to make a useful and reliable widget and can churn them out on an industrial scale no problem. I do not see the value in doing the same with software. We already get mass-production for free because the product is bytes. Why are we industrializing the process of making millions of variations of the same thing? Surely the effort would be better spent finding the "screw" of software, perfecting it, and making it trivial for users to accomplish whatever task they want without having to generate the gaps between with untested code. I want modularity and better design, not automated design.
The paychecks weren’t great. Everyone was offering to pay designers with “exposure”. If they didn’t innately care about the field they would have done something more lucrative.
Man so much of this thread is full of such high minded philosophizing, it's like we're debating wine instead of talking about interfaces for doing things.
Like, maybe I just want to make an interface to configure my homemade espresso dohickey, do I have to wear a turtleneck and read Christopher Alexander now? I just wanted a couple buttons and some sliders.
We don't all have to be experts in everything, some people just need a means to an end, and that's ok. I won't like the wave of slop that's coming, but the antidote certainly isn't this.
Why do you want sliders when a config file would do the same just fine?
It's true that design theory writing is annoyingly verbose and intangible, but that doesn't make it wrong. Give someone a concrete language spec and they will not really know how it feels to use the language, and even once they do experience its use they will not be able to explain that feeling using the language spec. Invariably the language will tend to become intangible and likely very verbose.
But to answer your question: no, it's of course perfectly serviceable to just copy the interface others have created, and if the needs aren't exactly the same you can just put up with the inevitable discomfort from where the original doesn't translate into the copy.
Don’t be so anti-intellectual, there’s enough of that around. A simple problem is going to have a small set of simple design solutions; the philosophising readily admits that. Nothing’s getting in your way.
I’m not being anti-intellectual, I’m being anti-elitist and anti-obfuscation.
It’s not the science and intellect I take issue with, engineering has plenty of that. It’s the art-adjacent navel gazing post modern bullshit I don’t like.
Well I think that art is good, thinking about design is good, that using a couple of terms that aren’t immediately clear to you isn’t “obfuscation”, and that postmodernism can be a useful analytical lens. Seeing the world only through science and engineering (as useful as they can be when applied well) is cold, dead, and sad.
Depends on what you’re building and whether it’s recreational or not. Complex architecture vs a ui analysis tool, for example. For a ui analysis tool, the only reason you code by hand is for the joy of coding by hand. Even though you can drive a car or fly in a plane there are times to walk or ride a bike still.
I don't really understand what you mean by this. The claim is that the same prompt with the same question produces worse results when it's queried in a model that has more than 200k tokens in its context. That doesn't have to do much with the "skillfulness" of using a model.
Prompt quality does matter, but at some point context side does matter.
I’ve had thing like a system that has a collection of procedural systems. I would say “replace the following set of defaults that are passed all around for system X (list of files) and in the managed (file) by a config” and it would do that but I’d suddenly see it be like “wait mu and projection distance are also present in system Y and Z. Let me replace that by a config too with the same values”. When system Y and Z uses a different set of optimized values, and that was clearly outside of the scope.
Never had that kind of mistakes happen when dealing with small contexts, but with larger contexts (multiple files, long “thinking” sequences) it does happen sometimes.
Definitely some times when I though “oh well my bad, I should have clarified NOT to also change that other part”, all the while thinking that no human would have thought to change both
None of what has been described is a "skill issue". The problem is when an identical prompt produces poor results once the context window exceeds 200k tokens or so.
> Consider that the POTUS is a 34x convicted criminal
To be fair, they were political persecutions and show trials just so that people like you could write that sentence and help the Democrat Party keep the presidency.
I’m not saying Trump is innocent in life, so don’t mistaken what I am saying for that. I am clearly and specifically saying that the 34 convictions are a joke and that only the gullible and the zealots buy into them.
Isn't the 34 counts due to the fact that the trial concluded that Trump paid Daniels via Cohen but hidden the payment as "legal expenses" and therefore falsified 34 different documents?
It is not like they invented extra fake actions that Trump did not do, it is all part of the same fraud. Either you recognize that Trump was guilty in this affair, and he gets X counts of fraud, X being a large number due to the number of document involved (and maybe someone can argue on the exact count, but 34 or 28 is not a big difference, so it is a different argument that move the goalpost), or Trump was not guilty at all. You cannot really say "well, Trump is guilty for the first 2 counts, but then not the 32 other counts": how can he be guilty in one document and not be guilty in the other which is basically identical except for the date?
Also, isn't a large number of counts of conviction pretty common in case of fraud? (for exactly the reason I've given: the falsification of each document counts for 1 count)
People who claims that 34 counts of conviction is the result of a political persecutions seems to have no idea that 1) this is usually how it works, this is usually what people get for fraud, there was no special treatment for Trump, 2) pretending that it was maybe 1 or 2 counts of felony but not 34 does not make any sense, 3) even if they wanted, it would not have been possible for the trial to conclude "just 1 or 2 counts", and it is therefore ridiculous to pretend that this number is the result of a political bias where they choose the higher number just to be mean toward Trump.
> and help the Democrat Party keep the presidencty
You're writing your own narrative there bud. I'm not even a USA citizen, I have literally zero ability to influence the USA electorate to any degree. So cut the rhetoric, it's tiring and frankly destructive to real discussion.
I'm neither gullible nor a zealot. Trump has a long standing history of ripping people off for many millions of dollars, regardless of the currency. There's an endless supply of receipts, give me a break.
And that's long before we even consider that he's literally operating illegal wars (not approved by congress), which _is_ breaking USA law.
To me it just comes across as low emotional intelligence. There are very few things worthy of being furious, in my opinion. Being furious is high cost.
Oh it’s deliberate. It’s been THE online platform for far left radicalization and extremist views for at least a decade now. It’s by far the most intolerant social media platform relative to the mainstream platforms.
Not entirely but I would use this and not Figma. I am passionate about system design not visual design so I don’t want to waste time in figma.
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