Every week, sometimes a few times a week, I cruise related sites in an interesting way. I try to find an interesting story on one of the mob-media controlled sites, reddit or digg et al, and then from there I try to only click links without using the keyboard. I follow the rabbit hole from story to story in a sort of uncontrolled way. Its a great way to kill a an hour and also to go to sites that you usually wouldn’t find any other way.
The other day while following a design pathway through sites I started hitting nothing but “Interface Designer” websites. I’m not sure where all these people came from. Looking at their resumes it seems that most of them just got out of high school or are coming from unrelated fields. How does someone that has been an oil painter for 5 years now claim to be an interface designer. What sort of training or user experience background do they have? If you look at the examples or the recent projects of their sites, you see a few tiny sites they have designed but without much ‘interface’ involved.
That leads me to believe that “Interface Designer” is now the chic term for web designer. Why not call yourself a web designer? I think thats a pretty cool job title. It has been worn out over the years, granted. Everyone and their brother was a website designer in the late 90s. On asking them what they have done or what tools they use you find out that they are just starting and have bequeathed the title on themselves.
Will Interface Designer will be an ‘uncool’ term in a few years? Maybe.
I think the line got blurred when website became more and more web applications ..
But in my opinion, I don’t think it really matters. All my client end up calling me “the computer guy” anyway.