> As an engineer you can subversively affect graphic design and you often have massive control over aesthetics.
For most of my career I was a hybrid designer/developer. There's definitely a dialog between them, and engineering enables and constrains some elements of the esthetics, but in general I would say it works the other direction more often than not.
That's why when I read about von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Engineering Design, it really rang true for me: "If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist’s concept."
We're just talking about esthetics, rather than functionality or purpose or process, which are much more of a give-and-take.
This is why I eventually just moved straight over to design: so much of product development is path-dependent, and designers exert a ton of leverage just by creating documents upstream of engineers.
For most of my career I was a hybrid designer/developer. There's definitely a dialog between them, and engineering enables and constrains some elements of the esthetics, but in general I would say it works the other direction more often than not.
That's why when I read about von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Engineering Design, it really rang true for me: "If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist’s concept."
We're just talking about esthetics, rather than functionality or purpose or process, which are much more of a give-and-take.
This is why I eventually just moved straight over to design: so much of product development is path-dependent, and designers exert a ton of leverage just by creating documents upstream of engineers.