Design culture is a frozen shithole

I'll toss in a few thoughts. Design is something that evolves over time. We're slowing working towards improving the design of the internet by taking two steps forward and one back. We build off each other, so you don't see huge changes in design overnight. This is no different than any other technology. If I raise someone in solitude, and ask them to design a car, it'll be quite primitive. Modern cars improve each year from those prior. Occasionally they misjudge, and take a step backwards, but over time, they improve. It's the same with design. If you ask someone that has no experience online to design a webpage, they'll fall short.

We keep building from what we assume is the best. If a popular site goes with flat design, it leads us to believe flat design might be attributing to their success. So, we try to follow suit with trial and error. If flat design is working for them, maybe taking it to an even more extreme and reducing all images and gradients will leave us even more successful. Or, maybe only some aspects of their flat design are contributing to their success, and it's a balance between flat and non-flat elements.

Which is best? No one knows. We'll try all the possible combinations, and gravitate towards what's successful with profits, and with users. You can't expect these changes over night. Right now designers are quite sure the future involves more minimal design. The only way to test this is to experiment with different combinations.

So, don't piss on someone because they try an extremely flat design and it fails. The only reason we know it fails is because they went out on a limb to try it out. Instead, thank them for trying, look towards any aspects of their design that did work, and improve on their failure. I can guarantee we're going to have an even better experience browsing the internet 10 years from now. It's going to happen because of many designers and developers failing, and few standing on them and succeeding.

The original purveyors of flat design were well intentioned. They based their designs on sound principles (simplicity, authenticity, mobile-first). They didn't intend to have their designs turn into a rigid style.

Other designers started to notice. People started blogging about the "flat design movement" (which didn't yet exist, but nevertheless made for a great headline). Some designers agreed with the sentiment and copied the style.

Then, nobody could deny the impact of flat design. It was everywhere.

But for every designer out there, there are hundreds of imitators. They call themselves designers, but all they know how to do is clone a certain look. They are like the skilled painters who make forgeries of famous paintings, but can't paint originals. They started copying the flat design they saw everywhere. Except they didn't understand the principles behind flat design. They used it where it was not appropriate. They took it to absurd extremes. They disregarded readability, usability, and originality in pursuit of a certain look.

So now you have the same bad design everywhere.

Design fads exist because most most web designers are really imitators. They don't tailor a solution to fit the problems. They are just good at imitating other people's solutions. And since most founders / bosses / HR people aren't designers either, the imitators get hired.

"don't let the TEDx asshats get you down" yes!

Starting with the assumption that centralized system are generally wasteful compared to decentralized systems [1]: Why does middle-management exist? As a class of worker, I mean. They are a vast body of employees who do nothing directly towards consuming input resources and transforming them into output products and services. They exist solely to organize the people who do real work into a large, hierarchical organization. But to what end?

From a labor and trade perspective, the most efficient transaction is Person A making a thing and Person B buying it directly from Person A. There is no additional overhead of management, transportation, holding stock in display rooms, etc. But it's impossible to make those sorts of connections on the daily, hourly, minutely basis necessary to make an economy flow.

The best answer I've ever gotten was "it's more efficient!" So we've been told, but has anyone checked? And to which, the best answer I've ever received was, "well, it hasn't been disproven." Because of the key role of distribution in an economy, we accept these other inefficiencies.

But is that absolute? I think we are seeing proto-elements of decentralized distribution in sites like Etsy (which serves only to connect producers to customers) and Amazon (which both connects trading entities and performs stock warehousing and shipping for them, but doesn't actually produce anything of their own). We are only now entering an era of eCommerce. Everything before now has been "commerce as it has been since the industrial revolution" just on the Internet.

[1] and I do acknowledge that it is an assumption. But I think it's a stronger position than "bigger is better".