The Tumultuous Evolution of the Design Profession

Via Jeremy Keith’s link blog I found this article: Elizabeth Goodspeed on why graphic designers can’t stop joking about hating their jobs. It’s about the disillusionment of designers since the ~2010s. Having ridden that wave myself, there’s a lot of very relatable stuff in there about how design has evolved as a profession.

But before we get into the meat of the article, there’s some bangers worth acknowledging, like this:

Amazon – the most used website in the world – looks like a bunch of pop-up ads stitched together.

lol, burn. Haven’t heard Amazon described this way, but it’s spot on.

The hard truth, as pointed out in the article, is this: bad design doesn’t hurt profit margins. Or at least there’s no immediately-obvious, concrete data or correlation that proves this. So most decision makers don’t care.

You know what does help profit margins? Spending less money. Cost-savings initiatives. Those always provide a direct, immediate, seemingly-obvious correlation. So those initiatives get prioritized.

Fuzzy human-centered initiatives (humanities-adjacent stuff), are difficult to quantitatively (and monetarily) measure.

“Let’s stop printing paper and sending people stuff in the mail. It’s expensive. Send them emails instead.” Boom! Money saved for everyone. That’s easier to prioritize than asking, “How do people want us to communicate with them — if at all?” Nobody ever asks that last part.

Designers quickly realized that in most settings they serve the business first, customers second — or third, or fourth, or...

Shar Biggers [says] designers are “realising that much of their work is being used to push for profit rather than change..”

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

As students, designers are encouraged to make expressive, nuanced work, and rewarded for experimentation and personal voice. The implication, of course, is that this is what a design career will look like: meaningful, impactful, self-directed. But then graduation hits, and many land their first jobs building out endless Google Slides templates or resizing banner ads...no one prepared them for how constrained and compromised most design jobs actually are.

Reality hits hard. And here’s the part Jeremy quotes:

We trained people to care deeply and then funnelled them into environments that reward detachment. ​​And the longer you stick around, the more disorienting the gap becomes – especially as you rise in seniority. You start doing less actual design and more yapping: pitching to stakeholders, writing brand strategy decks, performing taste. Less craft, more optics; less idealism, more cynicism.

Less work advocating for your customers, more work for advocating for yourself and your team within the organization itself.

Then the cynicism sets in. We’re not making software for others. We’re making company numbers go up, so our numbers ($$$) will go up.

Which reminds me: Stephanie Stimac wrote about reaching 1 year at Igalia and what stood out to me in her post was that she didn’t feel a pressing requirement to create visibility into her work and measure (i.e. prove) its impact.

I’ve never been good at that. I’ve seen its necessity, but am just not good at doing it. Being good at building is great. But being good at the optics of building is often better — for you, your career, and your standing in many orgs.

Anyway, back to Elizabeth’s article. She notes you’ll burn out trying to monetize something you love — especially when it’s in pursuit of maintaining a cost of living.

Once your identity is tied up in the performance, it’s hard to admit when it stops feeling good.

It’s a great article and if you’ve been in the design profession of building software, it’s worth your time.