kosmar

Das Smashing Magazine hatte nach der Situation von Webdesign-Freelancing in Deutschland gefragt. Einige andere und ich haben geantwortet.

Selbst noch nicht gelesen: Showcase Of Web Design In Germany.

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Aha, meine Antworten hat der Redakteur wohl dem Gott der zu langen Artikel geopfert. Macht nix. Immerhin ist mein Name richtig geschrieben …

Hier, was ich antwortete:

1. Could you please describe current situation on German design market. How the life of a freelancer, developer and designer in Germany looks like? How much do designers earn?

of course i cannot speak for the german market, just for myself. being a freelancer occupied with mainly designing the interwebs out of berlin – which might bias my perceptions in a certain way, as berlin is always said to be different to the rest of the country – i can only say that right now i am drowning in work. it wasn’t this way all through the year, as the infamous crisis seemed to hit the creative industries as well. but since the summer is over inqueries keep on rolling in.

the financial situation is following the regular market rules of course, so rates did not go down compared to last year. but they didn’t raise either. numerically speaking i guess reasonable freelancers are currently available from around 300 euros up to infinity depending on the scope and extent of the job, the expertise of the person and the magic two-sided triangle where clients can choose two out of the threesome of good, fast and inexpensive.

2. Are there any common usability patterns, rules of thumbs that are typical for German design? Are the standards of web design in Germany changing?

it is very difficult to recognize specific patterns when you live on the inside of a system. i guess the good old german qualities still apply, like crisp accuracy, a certain ingenuity and moderate fidelity. all these serving a good direction. since some years i keep pushing things into user-centric mindsets and the aspect of joy-of-use.

i guess that also is a general tendency, at least i do hope it is.

Also the uprising of the social web, the participatory elements that bring the web back to its intended purpose is highly influencing how communications are set up in the media and the web nowadays. Also writing down thoughts that are rather simple in long complicated sentences seem to be german ;)

3. Is professional education really important in the design industry and do you feel there is adequate education available in Germany, for developing world class designers?

our craft – or is it really an industry – always was open for people coming from the outside. within a decade i never was asked for a paper concerning my educational records, neither did i ask anyone about it, when i was in a position to decide about employment or involvement of anybody for design or concept work.

still i feel, mainly in webdesign, people are educated or educated themselves much better than they have been in the late nineties. anyway you can never stop to learn, so the older you get, the less important gets your initial education.

concerning “world class” – what or who defines that? it is always the reason of a design that is the measure to it’s greatness.

the one person with the best idea is the one that gets it done. in the end this may as well and of course be the database developer. i tend to not believe in heros.

4. Where do you get inspiration from? How do you stay informed about last design trends? What design-related websites do you visit (or read via RSS Reader) every day? What books and magazines do you read?

i hardly read printed magazines, i must admit. just music stuff. i also lost most of my addiction to television. i subscribed a lot of rss-feeds of all kinds of flavors. but my main source of information, as well as inspiration – concerning news, creativity and technology – are the nearly 2k people i do follow on twitter, and a bunch of tumblr and soup.io blogs i occacionally dive in, plus the sites i get delivered from stumbleupon.com.

the news will find me.

i use feedly as my feedreader. that is a firefox/safari/chrome plugin, that builds upon google reader and is aware of my greader, friendfeed and twitter contacts and thus is putting some relevance into the rss items. i just exported my opml and you can get it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/302068/kosmar_opml.xml – some of them are design related of course.

5. Are there any issues unique to German web design? Do you see any remarkable differences in comparison with worldwide creative industry?

no :) srsly: the web is global, things get flattened down to a universal common sense more and more. which is good and bad at the same time. a designer always has to look at what the culture is in which the target group of users lives in. this is different for each project – probably on a level as big as from country to country, at least when you look at europe.

sure you can find specific attributes to american, south-african, japanese, chinese or german websites, including the style of the design – just by looking at them.

still more and more projects i work for exist on a rather global scale, taking the existing digital devide in the world into account. so these differences are to be explored and considered, but also brought together to a design that serves a one-size-fits-all approach. i call this cultural accessibility.