Relevant

Never mind design theory, composition, typography, hierarchy, conceptual problem solving, surviving a crit from your peers...all you need is Sketch!

While I appreciate the thought that product designers are less 'artist' and more 'business' these days - the article fails to recognize that it takes years to hone your skills/craft as a designer. This gives me the same feeling that I get when I see General Assembly's claim that in '12 weeks, you can be a working UX designer'. While true, its only a beginner's understanding. But hey, we all started somewhere, right?

None of us were born with an inherent mastery of design, it's taken thousands of hours to recognize when the alignment is off by a pixel on a retina-screen, or that there are inherited impressions when using a rounded button vs. a squared off one. These examples scratch the surface.

I like that my PMs are learning sketch - empowering them to create more work that we can discuss as a team/group. There are going to be obvious faux pas in their work, but being able to see something visually has always worked better than a brief or a oral-description for me.

Today, making a virtual product does not require nearly the same level of natural talent. You’re going to interact mostly with shapes, boxes, texts and photos. This removes a pretty huge barrier to entry for most people.

I'm not sure I have the energy to deconstruct this whopper of a paragraph, but I'll note that with this kind of obscene logic, anybody could really do anything at all.

What a load of crap. Let me summarize, "I use ketch and it's this super amazing app that lets you make anything you want, no skills necessary." In short, this is a "business" guy who discovered Sketch and assumes he can be a designer now.

The great thing about art school, from someone in it right now, is that it teaches you things that you don't know you don't know; to learn something online, you need to have first seen or heard of it to research it.

No Sketch tutorial is going to mention positive/negative space, even though its vital to a balanced composition. The purpose of each tutorial is to teach one individual technique, and that tunnel vision leads to a very limited skillset.

Design is a way of thinking, and without learning the fundamentals of that mindset, we would be, as a professor of mine once said, "Monkeys sitting at computers"

This is how the Age of Dark Patterns begins.

You don’t need to go to school anymore.

Wat

I agree that designers don't have to come from Art School anymore since now we find knowledge and opportunities outside of school. But we can't still disregard Art as it's the fundamental of design.

The same goes for Developers, Musician, Chefs, Writer, and other creative fields. Effort prevails over formal recognition but fundamentals remain the same.

Get your pitchforks!

With tools like Webflow and Squarespace we all can be developers!

With tools like sketch we can all be designers!

To be honest though I don't disagree with that he's saying. The notion that you need to be an artist to be a designer isn't true. But at the same time, being a designer without the creativity and out of the box thinking an artist often brings to the table is a big achilles heal.

This is a solid quote too:

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.” Robert Greene — Mastery

A business savvy, self-taught interactive designer that doesn't go to Design school... That sounds more like a Developer that only does Flat Design and is trying to get rich with an app.

"Why the future will be lead by talking dogs"

look I can do it too!!

How fun!

I'm all for encouraging people to get started by downplaying the long stressful hours/years needed to learn a skill at a professional level, but it's naive to think it's really that easy.

hahahaha

Most of them are “Dribbble designers”.

First "Full Stack Designer" last week now this... SMH

Most designers I know didn't attend college for design. Some of them never even finished high school. It's absolutely possible to become a great designer without having any formal education, though it's not going to happen overnight.

Most designers I know went to Design Schools, not Art or Business.

Design Schools teach you about user observation, visual thinking, hierarchy, shape, prototyping, iterating & testing, etc. They have different specialization like Retail, Product, Interaction, Mobility, Graphic, etc.

There are also many Design Schools who offer double-degrees with Business Schools. I have many designer friends who studied Strategy and Marketing at school.

I don't understand the problem here?

This is not completely true. Not every business person can study sketch and be a designer, it requires talent and a lot of practice which business people don't really have time for. I do believe designers should understand business but it has to be built from a design pov and grow into it.

Is that a sponsored article?