designer

Pluraldesigners

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A person who plans how something will look, work, or be made, often as a profession.

   The designer reworked the packaging until it caught the eye on the shelf.

   A good designer balances how a product looks against how easily people can use it.

   Similarcreator, planner

2. 2
   adjective

   Made by a designer, especially one working in fashion.

   He showed up to the party in a designer suit and polished shoes.

   Counterfeiters flood the market with fakes of every popular designer label.

   Similarluxury, high-end, branded, upscale

   Oppositegeneric, unbranded, off-the-rack, mass-market

   Note

   A noun pressed into service in front of another noun, as in designer swimwear, a designer briefcase or a designer suit. It does not compare, so nothing is more designer or the most designer. What it signals is the name behind the object, most often a fashion designer's. That is why it sits so naturally beside the word label.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A software tool used to create or design things, such as page layouts or user interfaces.

   The form designer in this IDE generates the layout code automatically.

   Developers use the visual designer to arrange components without writing markup by hand.

   Similareditor, builder

   Note

   Software borrows the job title for the program that does the job. These tools are usually named by what they build: a form designer, a font designer, a visual designer for interfaces. The same compounds are shared with the human designer, so a level designer for a video game may be the colleague or the application. Only context tells you which one is meant.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A person given to plotting or scheming, often with cunning or self-serving aims.

   The court was full of designers, each plotting to outmaneuver the others.

   He proved himself a ruthless designer, manipulating allies until he seized power.

   Similarschemer, plotter, intriguer, conspirator, manipulator

   Note

   The darker side of the same formation, design + -er, built on design as intention rather than drawing: the designs a person has on something they mean to get. Nothing in the word itself marks the shift from the professional planner, so the surrounding sentence has to do it. A court full of designers is a court full of plots, not of sketches.

Showing meanings only. Show all 4