Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

by Mike Monteiro

That’s when I understood. A lot of designers equate designing with the pushing of pixels. (So do the people who hire us.) We equate our power with the ability to move this tiniest of units into proper and pleasing placements. We still believe this to be our one true purpose. This, and only this, is design work. Thus everything I was currently doing wasn’t design work, but rather things keeping me from doing true design work. We’ve also been taught to persuade people by how well we can position pixels. (Let your work speak for you!) When people push back on our solutions, we react by pushing pixels to other new places, as if persuasion happens at the pixel level. We equate our jobs with aesthetics and while aesthetics are certainly a component of design, they’re truly just a small component. A tiny bit. The smallest bit possible. We need to care much more about the effects of our work than the cleverness of our pixel positioning. If we want to truly influence what we’re designing, and to have