I suspect a lot has to do with the fact that it's easier to slap together a quick list/ menu thing than it is to make a select box look the way a designer wants it to. Similarly with calendar components, radio buttons, etc.
What has happened in that scenario is that the designer has failed in their job. Unfortunately it’s up to engineers to catch this, which they often don’t
Designers don't really know or understand the limits of how you can style a select box. Nor should they need to. A good team will work together around the limits.
Also, FWIW some of the problem is with the browser makers (still!!). CSS still has a lot of browser specific quirks when working with some components.
> Designers don't really know or understand the limits of how you can style a select box. Nor should they need to.
Designers absolutely need to be aware of and work within their platform's constraints, like a painter needs to understand and work with the physical characteristics of their canvas. It's this kind of mentality that results in visual specs that read "Make the window look exactly, to the pixel, like this Photoshop image!"
I'm sure the designers who work on GDS[0] and its design system do. You are probably right that most don't, they should in my opinion. Of course you are also right that good teams will work together on this. I think the best designers have an understanding of HTML/CSS or the native toolkits if they work on Android/iOS. They know when the user experience will be signficantly improved by a custom component and work with their team to make it accessible and good in those case. They also know when not to reinvent a select to make it look slightly better.
This subthread is about why divs are used for buttons and why developers reimplement existing HTML components poorly. Good designers help their teams avoid this, good engineers work with their designers to avoid it.
If the site looks correct visually, the designer has actually completed their job. You’ll find that very few businesses care how a page is implemented and happily pay for shit html if it looks right.
This painfully reminds me of ages ago, pre-ie6 even, when we would get html-tables, spacergifs and whatnots, blurped out by ancient Dreamweaver, Paint Shop Pro slices and such.
It looked good. But hardly worked.
Apparently the web hasn't really changed in that part: we're still churning out HTML that hardly works, but "looks good".
