Designers are the most creative and interesting people I've met in the tech industry.
I've had the great pleasure to work alongside designers who are wonderful artists, often across multiple mediums. Looking at their portfolios can be intimidating. These are award-winning leaders who tend to work with other award-winning leaders.
Importantly, great designers are usually folks with great taste. And taste matters.
Companies are desperate for attention, and the tech industry pays big money for taste. Landing pages are a prioritized focus for design teams, like at OpenAI and Anthropic. Big brands are winning Awwwards too, such as Shopify and Spotify.
I used to work for a design team at one of these big tech companies. We wanted to win Awwwards too, and sometimes, we did. The company was excited, but I struggled to feel the same.
I used to wonder how I could work with all of these great minds, but feel so awful about work. We'd spend hours upon hours wrestling over pixel perfection, trying our best to satisfy the standards of folks who'd won awards, who'd worked on campaigns we all knew and loved. So why couldn't I be happy here? Was it just imposter syndrome?
The answer, at least for me, was that while I was proud to be doing the most visible, most impressive work of my career, I was ashamed of what we were building for the world. We looked great and we had an expensive brand that was designed to speak to humans about human values. Of course, we paid for that. We user-tested the brand. We spent huge dollars to make sure the message resonated with people and evoked an emotional response. We A/B tested our values.
There's an old phrase that feels appropriate: putting lipstick on a pig.
These design teams are filled with magnificent talent, and working alongside them was a huge honour. However, I'm not proud of the work I did on those teams.
We did build beautiful things, and we did sincerely practice our craft to the best of our ability. We knew millions of people would see our work.
But in the end, we built things that were beautiful and then we slapped them on pigs.