I am writing an article about the desperate search for UX/UI/Visual Designers

[Jens Nikolaus]

Hej everyone,
I started to write a piece about my search for UX/UI/Visual Designers
in Berlin and how I fail at finding them.

Despite my great network of wonderful & talented people it is
impossible to find you. Yes, you there! Hej! Since I started my
freelancing business two years ago I am looking for people who can
support my work and whose work I can support and be inspired by. I
only know a few I can count on two hands, the professionals and
talented kids like @maxfell and @christowski.

Why is it so hard to find them? Are they even there, or am I just
making this up? I would love to get your opinion on this, from all
perspectives: You, the one I talk to, managing designers, developers,
HR managers etc.

My hope this article reaches many of you designers and people who know
designers in Berlin.

If you would like to participate, please send me an email or chat me
up on Twitter: @jensnikolaus

Thank you,
Jens

[Simon Perdrisat]

Hi,

I think one of the big problem on the UI  and design side is all the work is proprietary. They almost never show publicly they work in progress.

You don't have the dynamic, standardisation and communities than you can find in the programmer side. For example if you look for a great Drupal developer, you can just go on drupal.org.  You can see peoples contributions (code, doc, forum, translation) and you can also track someone and read his past post to see how he collaborate with others. Is similar for every open source project.

BTW, the absence of standardisation make me crazy, every time I receive a PSD the file has a different organisation.... (For the record, I think the best way is using layer composition to show different state). An other consequence is designs are influenced by technique but not so much the oposite. Designer can see technical experimentation and say "that's cool! I want that!" but as a programmer you rarely say "oh this design is so cool we absolutely need to find a way to be hable to make it", because you don't see sketch.

So in my point of view, designers/UX/UI have no visibility because they are not allow to have one and are not use to do it.

Regards

Simon

--
Simon Perdrisat :: http://cloud33.com :: Skype gagarine42 :: http://twitter.com/gagarine
This email is a green one... don't print it.

[Richie]

Hi,

I'm a developer and I think there is a big difference between
designers and UX specialists.

For me User Experience is fundamentally different from design as I
think design is all about nice colors and golden ratio, while UX is
about using a big green button for signup and making text readable
(eg. with CSS leading like this: p {line-height:1.5em} ). Of course,
this example is oversimplified, but I've seen unrecognizable links in
text color more than once. And these sites were often run by
designers, never by UX people who know that a link should be blue and
easy recognizable.

For me the most valuable design related people are the ones who are
able to create great typography. I believe there are only a handful of
them in Berlin. There are more illustrators and screen designers.

One illustrator/designer friend of mine I would like to promote is
Susanne Paschke http://www.susannepaschke.de/
If you want to find more designers I can recommend communities like
Dribbble and Forrst. Tip: you can search for a city on Forrst ;-)


Richard
@rmetzler

[Jens Nikolaus]

Hello!
Thank you so much for the feedback so far, also the feedback I got on
Twitter.

Status is that I started coming up with “my definition” of designer, I
will put together interview questions for the people who are
interested in participating in this article. I am still looking for
people who actually hire in companies, so let me know if you want to
join the conversation.

This article will still reflect my point of view, enriched with your
thoughts.

Also talked to my friend Nadine from Design Made in Germany who will
push this on their blog as a guest-post, which is exciting.

My motivation is that you, the designer, will read this and
acknowledge what you are worth and that people really want to work
with you.
So get out there!

Updates soon,
Jens

On May 17, 11:46 pm, Richie <rich...@eaglefeed.me> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a developer and I think there is a big difference between
> designers and UX specialists.
>
> For me User Experience is fundamentally different from design as I
> think design is all about nice colors and golden ratio, while UX is
> about using a big green button for signup and making text readable
> (eg. with CSS leading like this: p {line-height:1.5em} ). Of course,
> this example is oversimplified, but I've seen unrecognizable links in
> text color more than once. And these sites were often run by
> designers, never by UX people who know that a link should be blue and
> easy recognizable.
>
> For me the most valuable design related people are the ones who are
> able to create great typography. I believe there are only a handful of
> them in Berlin. There are more illustrators and screen designers.
>
> One illustrator/designer friend of mine I would like to promote is

> Susanne Paschkehttp://www.susannepaschke.de/

[Martin Stadler]

Hi!

I'm the Lead Frontend Engineer at excentos [1], we're building online product advisors and we're hiring screen designers (UI/visual) and interaction designers (UX/UI whatever) full-time and freelancing. I'd love to participate as we are frequently discussing about what skills are crucial and about candidates' profiles and how to find them at all.

Cheers,
Martin

[1] http://www.excentos.com/