Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jonathan Omar Bowman

I hear a lot of criticism of redesigns and I’m thinking to myself, what the darn? First of all, I’ve been designing professionally for over 18 years, not once have I ever felt entitled to belittle someone on their explorations or concepts. I love concepts — because concepts are concepts; and they’re great gateways to creativity and the final product. Who are these people who bash other people? What makes you a real designer? What makes you a better designer? To me, there are phases, once you’ve mastered one you push on to the next; so we’re all experiencing the same things, just over time at our own pace. So no one will be better, you’re just at a different experience level. At one point in your career you should be in a concept phase, throwing out cool concepts just for fun.

A real designer is a problem solver. Unsolicited redesigns are not solving problems, nor do they imply they solve a problem; they’re just fun ways of looking at a product and taking a different look at how it could be. If your having fun, you’re not designing, however, I don’t think you were ever claiming to be. Most Behance and Dribbble shots are just for fun.

So the next time you want to criticize a redesign or a Dribbble shot, think about why the designer thought this was important. Think about why they did I it. Their true purpose was exploration. And if it wasn’t for exploration, we wouldn’t be where we are today in the world.

Respect the craft. Respect the fun it has to offer. Respect each other.

Jonathan Bowman is a Product Designer living in Oakley and working in Silicon Valley. He has been designing interfaces since 1999. He’s the founder of Cap Gun Media. He is Co-Founder of Oxygen for Autism. These days, you can find him in the Valley, working on building a better network router experience. When he’s not working you may find him on his back porch relaxing on his hammock reading a book.

Follow him today on twitter, at UXDJB

Why I Think Unsolicited Flashy Redesigns Are Great was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why I Think Unsolicited Flashy Redesigns Are Great

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