Comment by OhMeadhbh

You're looking at the wrong designers. Tufte and Vignelli had great collateral and were appropriately restrained in design elements they used. I don't know if I saw Rams or Esslinger's web sites, but I saw printed material they produced. Definitely on the "restrained" side.

As to why younger designers insert their busy selves in designs? I have a history of making tools. I learned early that good tools allow the user to think of the tool as an extension of the self. When you hammer a nail, you don't think about the hammer, you think about where the nail is (or maybe where your thumb is.) When you twist a wrench, you (hopefully) think about how much torque you're delivering, not about how finely crafted the wrench is.

But there is a school of thought that everything must be a delighter. You must make your tools so finely crafted your users can't ignore them. I blame Steve Jobs (or maybe people mis-interpreting Jobs exhortation to make insanely awesome products.). I think Jobs and Lowey and Issingler were talking about the experience of the artifact being awesome, not every visual aspect of the tool. If making something flashy detracts from the use of the tool... That's not insanely awesome, imho. But I think this is something you learn over time and you're rewarded at d-school for ostentatious demonstrations of design concepts.

In short ... There's a lot of bad design out there because there are a lot of insecure inexperienced designers out there who work cheap and customers who wouldn't know good design if it bit them on the ass. (Not that design frequently takes an ass biting form.)

And remember... If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb