While working on my personal rebrand, I got hung up on what particular job title I can use that best describes me and what I do. I found that none of the existing titles which are conventionally recognised really fit. So I invented my own. I’m a Web design tinkerer.

It’s not a job title per se, more a mindset and approach to work. A Web design tinkerer broadly covers UI design and front-end design engineering.

As the name suggests, to tinker is to make the small changes. To iterate rapidly and refine over time. The design tinkerer centres around a few design philosophies and truths:

1. Design is as much about what you take away as what you add
2. Small changes can make huge differences
3. A great design lands through iteration.

Design Tinkering for the web

A website or app is modular—an aggregation of composable parts. A perfect medium to add to, to take away from, to modify, to refactor, to retest, review, to tinker with.

The Design tinkerer can work for any design discipline. But it works particularly well for web design, and more broadly software development. Unlike, for example Interior design—where the designer can only tinker during the initial design stage, not after the interior has been installed. The impermanence of digital products allows for ongoing design iteration as more is understood about user needs and how users interact with the product. The agile methodology favours tinkering.

As a Web design tinkerer, with a focus on the look and feel of interfaces, I figure out the smallest changes that can make the biggest impacts and best outcomes. From a baseline of often overlooked conventional web standards and accessibility guidelines, I add minimal but impactful visual and interactive flourish, along the lines of what I call The subtle art of making things POP—the use of typography, hierarchy, colour, white-space, layout and other design principles.

It is important to emphasise that, to describe the Design tinkerer as being exclusively concerned with the small changes, is not correct. It is not the small change to achieve a certain goal, it is the smallest change, which might be in itself a relatively large change. This is all to say that the Design tinkerer wouldn’t shy away from suggesting a website redesign for example, if that is the most appropriate thing to do.

The impact of restraint

A web design tinkerer rejects the assumption that big changes must be made to achieve the big impacts a client is asking for. To emphasise this point, lets look at music. Brian Eno’s An Ending (Ascent) is a very impactful piece of music, despite the fact that it’s just a sustained tone with some slow harmonic drift. Even though audiophiles will argue it’s a very complicated and nuanced piece, to my ears the merit lies in its simplicity and restraint.

Practical examples of tinkering

Optimising an interface for a newly identified user need or persona I’d find a way to satisfy the need without introducing new screens and user journeys, only doing so if necessary. This way, the product evolves slowly in response to changing user needs.

Improving the usability of an interface following an accessibility audit Simply remediating WCAG violations improves the interface for everybody, not just users with disabilities. From there I can address instances where best practices have been overlooked.

A website refresh to go with a new content strategy I’d seek to figure out how I can present the new content as well as possible with what already exists. An adjustment of a single font property and a few styling rules—loosening that line-height, reducing the line-length, or increasing the white-space might make a massive improvement to the presentation of content on a web page.

A new build Involved in a new build project pre-launch, there are a few principles I'd follow which are in-line with the ethos of a Web design tinkerer. Modularity—keeping components small, focused, and easy to adjust in isolation. Clear boundaries between concerns—to name a couple, global and component-level styling and keeping data handling separate from presentation logic. This ensures components can be tinkered with easily withough affecting other components. Workflow—chunking up what needs to be done into the smallest sensible tasks, keeping Pull Requests small in scope.

Conclusion

To get slightly tangential for a moment, AI has been hugely disruptive in the web development space. Traditional job roles and ways of working are shifting faster than before. I think the notion of rigid specialisation is on the decline and people may step out of those silos, and embrace the fluidity of work going into the AI era. Perhaps allowing themselves to be defined by the principles and philosophies they stand by, which I think will be more of a constant. I think a small part of this, is being creative and thoughtful with how a person brands and labels themselves.

Design Tinkerer is my manifestation of that line of thinking. And in true tinkerer fashion, even the label itself is open to iteration. As I take the next steps in my career—learn new things, live new experiences and work in new environments—it may evolve. It may change. It may be discarded altogether.

And that is a feature not a bug.