Unfortunately, not the Craft I was hoping for :(

https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Craft/1154

The real problem the designer and the engineering split.

Designers should be fired.

The best apps in history have been built by hackers with a great aesthetic sense.

Somehow we have lost this today.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed over my career bouncing between the video game industry and general software industry is that every decently sized game studio I’ve worked for has had people in the role of technical artist, these are the people who bridge the gap between art and engineering, but I’ve never seen a similar role though at massively larger software companies. I’ve seen people with strong design sense in engineering and people with engineering skills in design, but it’s always been siloed enough that they’ve never been able to really make an impact one way or another on the final product. I’ve always thought I would reuse that same structure even if I was making non video game software.

Like the author, I went into computer systems engineering though in around 1995, and then bailed because I wanted to design with computers, not design the computers themselves. Should've read the abstract a bit better, huh? I quit and have worked for myself over the 25+ years since, and similarly straddled design and development up until recently.

Something I've found challenging is that in my projects and pricepoints, it's felt like there is no time for craft. Always harried, always spread thin. Never enough budget to do much more than burn through code. And working with clients who barely know what they expect, so it's hard to confidently spend time on design polish while the chance of concepts being rejected on a whim seems quite random. I'd be the first to accept that these are likely self-inflicted situations through misguided quoting/positioning and lazy process.

I have many side projects, and craft is a difficult thing there too. We typically preach getting product in front of people as soon as possible, to hone from there. But when, as an individual or small team, do you get time to absolutely polish your login screen, as one example? You're generally adding requested features or fixing pain points. I see a login screen from Stripe or similar and think of the teams and meetings and testing that probably went into it. Obviously as smallfry, we can take a shortcut and copy what they've settled on, but that's not exactly craft.

Maybe when I retire I'll have time.

This is something I struggle with. I'm a perfectionist in my work- I'm the person who, without being told, periodically walks through our products flow and scrutinizes every detail. I make note of every little performance hitch, everything that looked a bit off on one device or browser, everything that would've annoyed me just a tiny bit as a user, and I go through and fix each and every one of them. Just because I want it to be good.

But I feel like larger companies systematically resist this kind of care. Through removal of agency (approval processes, splitting stakeholders across teams, top-down assignment) and through sprawling product complexity that leaves people no time to give attention to all the details because there are simply too many.

I think I just can't ever work at a large company. I care too much.

It’s ironic that the illustration in this post is the opposite of craft. It’s a random picture that looks like dramatic game concept art including what might be flying spiders. This apparently represents “crafting high-quality software” and was of course generated with an AI model.

The novelty value of these images is gone and they’re just visual noise now, like banner ads or mailing list signups. In the spirit of the post, when in doubt, simplify your content — and AI-generated illustrations should be the first to go.