Tangent rant: you've also nicely summed up the nature of design.
At a prior job, though it wasn't my official job title, I'd sort of adopted the role of de-facto user interface designer for many of out projects.
Nothing in the world made me want to punch babies more than someone bringing me a nearly complete piece of (usually crappy) software and asking, "Can you add a nice user interface to this?"
What they were asking for wasn't design, but decoration...or colloquially polishing a turd.
The actual, underlying design is about how the conceptual pieces fit together and interact within your gray matter. Ideally it's the first step, before a single line of code is written, and not an afterthought. But people dwell on the curves and pixels and blinky lights as "design" because...I dunno...they think it's sexy or something. OMG look I put blue LEDs on it!
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At a prior job, though it wasn't my official job title, I'd sort of adopted the role of de-facto user interface designer for many of out projects.
Nothing in the world made me want to punch babies more than someone bringing me a nearly complete piece of (usually crappy) software and asking, "Can you add a nice user interface to this?"
What they were asking for wasn't design, but decoration...or colloquially polishing a turd.
The actual, underlying design is about how the conceptual pieces fit together and interact within your gray matter. Ideally it's the first step, before a single line of code is written, and not an afterthought. But people dwell on the curves and pixels and blinky lights as "design" because...I dunno...they think it's sexy or something. OMG look I put blue LEDs on it!
Rant. Sorry. :)