I still think about the juicy condemnation of the design industry in Edwin Heathcote’s Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world.

In the heroic era of design, from the early to mid-20th century, it became a kind of cliché to put a claim on everything. Every single thing on Earth not produced by nature had been designed. That was the spiel. Design wanted it all.

Now Earth is a mess, its climate warming rapidly, its seas full of waste. There are microplastics in the glaciers, the air is polluted and forests are being destroyed to make more stuff. If everything is design, then design is responsible for all of it.

I think it’s because of my formative years as a designer, if I can be called such a thing, there really was a high pedestal for true designers. Not only is everything designed, the best design changes the world. Design is the true differentiator, what makes great products what they are. With a wide umbrella as well. The entire system around a product is designed.

And now, perhaps, the profession has lost its shine. Websites are riddled with user-hostile design. The term enshittification has entered the lexicon, which is carried out at the hands of designers. People aren’t as enamored with the products of companies that have just laid off their buddies, sometimes at peak profitability. And I get it. It’s down times for tech outside of the you-know-what sphere. I’m down to change with the times. I don’t think I could hack it at dentist school or whatever.

You and me, we can still do great design. It’s fun and can still be rewarding. Here’s some good advice from Sean Goedecke on software design:

When working on large existing codebases, useful software design discussions are way, way more concrete than many people believe. They typically involve talking about individual files or even lines of code. You thus can’t do useful software design without being intimately familiar with the codebase.

You can’t design software you don’t work on

Sean is talking about the design as code architecture, which is very legit. I think it’s even more true when it comes to visual design and UX. I don’t think you can roll into a design role on a product you barely know and do meaningful design on it on day one. You need to use it. Not that every decision should be make from your own personal bug-a-boos, but if you aren’t anywhere near feeling what the users of the app are feeling when they use it, your changes are just stabs in the dark.

My favorite kind of web designer you’d probably call a Design Engineer. Maggie Appleton avoids describing exactly what it is (on purpose), but it has to do with understanding the technological medium of which you work and implementing design with that understanding. And, like, well. Her article pointing out examples goes further than words alone.

One more interesting bit related to all this. Sometimes design is executed by people decently far away from any training and without it being a full-time job expectation. And I’m not talking about hand-scrawled signs by cash registers or graduation party flyers. Enter Canva. You’ve probably heard of it, but if not, I think it’s fair to say it’s a design tool for non-designers. It’s chock-a-block with templates, nice ones at that, and intuitive tools for updating those templates. Posters, social media cards, video thumbnails, logos, brochures, business cards, you name it. Professional output for professional things, done in moments.

Ernie Smith puts it in an interesting way.

Canva makes a bold bet with Affinity: The real money is in the rank-and-file office worker, not the professionals. It just turned the pro tool into the loss leader.

Affinity is in the league of Adobe tools like Photoshop. Canva bought it and is giving it away for free, much like grocery stores put milk at the back of the store. Using it means walking right past the other goods, like the easy-to-use design output tool on Aisle 2.