Comment by purplemoonx
3 hours ago
Taste was all that was left when product design peaked in like 2010-12 too and it was a great time.
But the advent of design systems and software like Sketch and Figma pretty much automated the job away. You didn’t need the raw Photoshop skills anymore - any CMU grad could be a top tier designer now.
I see the same thing basically happening here. Taste will matter for a while but eventually people are just choosing the most accepted/expected optimal choices and anything that falls outside the trend will be “not good” in the same way skeuomorphism in design is no longer good.
So we’re lucky we’re in a taste era - it’s a lot of fun. You (yes you!) can still change it, shape it, establish the status quo of tomorrow
Design is not moving pixels around in Photoshop or Figma. CMU grad could be a designer, but to be a great designer you do have to have... well, taste. Figma didn’t change that one bit.
I never quite fell for the scam of “designer who can’t photoshop”.
You can’t do product design without visual design - and many designers don’t. They’re picking from UI libraries like Tailwind or MUI, which is really something any developer could do, and many do. That’s why the job mostly died.
Even the most abstract of painters, fine artists, and so-on should have good fundamentals. They’ve gone through the discipline and developed taste, they don’t choose it from a library.
The CMU grad (using this as a stand-in now for any so-called educated hack, sorry CMU) is skipping all that and asserting personal authority without proving or living anything. And that shows IMO.
Companies don’t prioritize design anymore, but that’s a different topic.
I have yet to see a good design falling out of people building flying castles in Figma, disconnected from the realities and basics of web development's languages HTML and CSS.