I resonate with this article, especially with this particular quote:
“Art direction and copywriting are as fundamental to the user experience as the UI. Sure, you can have a beautiful UI/frame, but once you have that (we all know a great UI is an invisible UI), all the viewer cares about is what’s inside: the artwork, the story.”
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I acknowledge that often times as designers we tend to “shortcut” our way to delivering designs. I get it. Why not? I mean, there are so many tools, macros, plugins, UI kits available to pull from that there is no reason to recreate to wheel like piecing together a navigation bar, redraw an icon, assessing color treatments, etc. I agree.
I also think, though, that all of these resources available to us are just making us dumber. It takes away from our ability to do any kind of critical thinking and use our own creative direction or thought process for problems solving. It important that we continue to practice writing, practice using our color theory knowledge, practice research methodologies, practice problem solving in such a way that doesn’t require interface design, but perhaps even just figuring out what the actual problem is before jumping right into potential solutions.