My wife is a reporter. In her world, you do the work, you put your name on it. In the design world, you do your work, someone else puts their company name on it. Perhaps one reason we don’t get as much respect as we deserve is that we’re for the most part anonymous.
Unless you look at Comm Arts Interactive or something similar, you often have no idea who designed a particular site, application, or device. It would be nice if we could start including as part of our contracts, that someplace visible, either in documentation or under About This Site or About X Application, it says simply Designer: Your Name.
In this simple way, those of us who aren’t Phillipe Stark or Michael Graves would get what we all want: a little respect. And maybe more money too.
Gotta disagree on this. I was really surprised to see a “designed by” credit at the bottom of HOW (howdesign.com) when they unveiled their new site a couple years ago. It seems to me that the only people who tend to put their names on their public design work also tend to have geocities e-mail addresses. It just seems amaturish to me.
But beyond that… stroking the designer’s ego isn’t exactly at the heart of a user centered design process. From an observer’s point of view, they should think the client made the design themselves, or it sprang fully-formed from the mouth of Zeus. And that’s okay. There’s plenty of opportunity to take credit for designs when they’re safely in our portfolios.
The only reason I subscribe to for putting my name on a design is if it lends authority to the information, as Tufte advocates for infographics. The reasoning he advocates seems like it’s the same reason reporters put their name on their stories. They’re standing behind what they write.
// jeff