An excellent point raised over at Bokardo, which reminds us of a fact we sometimes lose sight of: that designers are marketers. Especially in web design, that’s a controversial point. Sure, the “tech geeks” who spend their days slinging pixels and hacking AJAX code tend to bristle a little at the marketing types, who breeze by in their suits and ties and golf tans on their way to another power lunch, but we have to acknowledge that the product of our work is the first thing every potential customer sees.
The thing that makes the boundary between web design and marketing so distinct is the kind of people each profession attracts. Marketers – the people who work in “sales” – are a different breed. They’re social, talkative, interactive, open, friendly, and persuasive. Web designers, on the other hand, spend all of their time working with machines and designing abstract things like software and graphics on them. So they’re likely to be introverted, intellectual, solitary, analytical, and strong on communications but weak on personality skills.
It terms of the Myer-Briggs personality types, engineers and artists are often (I)ntroverted, i(N)tuitive, (T)hinking, and (J)udgmental, while sales-staff and human-resource types tend to be (E)xtraverted, (S)ensing, (F)eeling, and (P)erceiving. The two personality types tend to clash. The manager’s job is to try to make everybody get along and work towards a common company goal.
Perhaps companies could do something to help these two tribes see eye-to-eye. Maybe they could have “take somebody from the other department to lunch” day! Perhaps, along with the new “eXtreme Programming” meme going around, we could assign web design teams composed of half-engineer and half-marketer. They each sit down and see what the other one does, and do the designing together.
Wouldn’t that be a nice world? But at the same time, we should cherish each type. If everyone was equally good at design and marketing, then nobody would be highly skilled in either one. There just doesn’t seem to be enough room in one human brain to cram in all of the learning needed to deal expertly with both people and computers. So we have to keep the two fields separate, while seeking to find a common ground between them.
Peter Brittain