Design culture is a frozen shithole

I'd love to know more companies that are doing good work, can you (or anyone else) list some startups/employers that are working on "real" problems, but may not be well known?

Personally, I'm a freelancer.

Don't ignore the public sector. Not everything is as bad as working for Raytheon on war industry projects, or working for Health and Human Services on disease industry projects. My experience has been: the more local, the better. There are some municipal IT departments that are trying to do good work and support open standards at the same time, in a realistic environment. I think it's a burgeoning area where more young people could turn their attention.

There are a lot of small manufacturers across the country (don't believe what you've heard, it's only gigantocorp manufacturing that is dead in America, and that's more because gigantocorps are on the way out than anything to do with manufacturing) that have very good, results-based attitudes to work. My current client is one such place. They essentially give me free reign over their project.

But ultimately, I think a person can do good work in any environment. Though you probably want to stay out of the boiler-rooms of anything that is closely ran by someone with an MBA. When you hear them start to talk about "our employees are our greatest asset", then you know they doth protest too much. Why would you want to be considered an "asset" anyway, which is by definition owned property? Stick to places that are pragmatic, open, and honest.

Replace "design" with "startups".

He is describing the culture of creating business's whose real purpose is to attract VC funding with the goal of finding an 'exit'.

"We follow the same worn-out, well-trodden, clichéd paths of those who came before us, over and over again, claiming to be the next best thing, when in reality we’re just the latest in a series of cookie-cutter gimmicks and frauds hoping to be validated by soulless marketplaces and rich white geriatrics like those bright-eyed, pimple-pocked stars that came before us."

Besides being a horrible, run on sentence, this is exactly how web design works.

People build the same thing over and over because that's what people BUY. If nobody bought any Toyota Camry's, then we wouldn't have millions of cars that all look the same and do the same thing. It's the same thing with web design. The people are who doing the really cool cutting edge design work are outliers - not the stuff you see a lot of in the mainstream sites who get the awards and visibility.

It's like Henry Rollins said about punk rock being dead. Actually punk is very much alive and kicking, but you won't see it on MTV, or on the music charts, or on the radio. You have to really dig to find real punk rock anymore. You can't go to the local "hipster" bar to see the local band imitating Green Day's pop-punk sound. No, you have to go to Chicago, in some dungy, hole-in-the-wall bar, and sit in the mosh pit with skinheads who haven't showered for a week, and the band comes on and belts out an hour of angry, non-conformist anthems and just oozes with anger and disenchantment. He said a lot better than I did, but you get the idea.

So yeah, good design isn't dead, you just have to did a little to find the good stuff.

Do you have thoughts as to why things are this way? I'd genuinely love to discuss them (and it sounds like you would too).