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

by Mike Monteiro

We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we love the cleverness of our ideas.

Hatred has stolen the conversation. The poor are now voting against themselves. But politics is not about left or right. It’s about up and down. The few screwing the many.”

I’m all for protecting free speech. Let’s start by amplifying the voices of those who’ve been silenced, not protecting the voices of those who’ve silenced them.

contrast, almost every design school graduate I interviewed, while super-talented, lacked the basic core of what it takes to become a professional designer coming out of school. They lacked a basic understanding of how businesses work, how to research a problem, how to measure

art has as much in common with design as a lobster has with a carrot cake.

There’s no quicker way to destroy someone’s confidence than teaching them that what they’re saying isn’t as important as what you’re saying.

Feigning ignorance that ethics is not part of your job as a designer is no longer valid.

You work for the people who aren’t in the room.

Everything you learned in school can be undone by one shitty client or one shitty boss that you’re not prepared for.

At some point, Congress, the majority of whom still print out all of their emails, will have to come in and regulate us.

I don’t give a good fuck whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, a Tory, a Socialist, a Liberal, a Conservative, a Mason, a Whig, or whether you take your orders directly from L’il Wayne albums played backward. As long as you are a designer, you have a responsibility to make the world better for the rest of humanity.