Designing Through the Noise: Four Essential Resolutions for 2025
How designers can navigate big social, personal creativity, and ethical and spiritual challenges in a world gone batty
We’re at the end of the line Gregorian calendar-wise. The final moments of 2024. A year of consequence and political drama around the planet. A year of social contagions and ridiculous memes and wasted campaign money. A year of cultural extravagances across mainstream media outlets built on the notion that fear alone drives us and finality is upon us.
A year of mistrust in so many institutions and individuals alike.
From the right and the left, all of this is happening simultaneously in North America and parts of Europe. We’re seeing mass confusion about what’s important (climate, healthcare, poverty) and confusion masquerading as meaning (intrigue, gossip, gear). People don’t know who to trust outside their immediate circles, and even then, conversations feel fraught and fragile, perhaps especially this week.
There is too much complexity in the system, too much churn and chaff — and we designers don’t make the time or have the time to sort out what is right and what is wrong for ourselves and for those nearest and dearest.
Can we be a little more specific?
I think so.
The fear and fantasy machines that are driving all of us a little mad — big social, consumer capture and media monopolies — also drive design and what people are expecting from us designers. They fuel what clients too often expect from design — better engagement, stronger search results, faster monetization — when design is really about soft connection and meaningful results.
I offer the following scenario related to website visitors. Would you rather 10,000 people visit your site and 1,000 people having an okay experience because they were driven there by search terms and paid advertising and they proceed to donate $10 each — or would you rather 1,000 people visit your site, be impressed by your investment in UX and content, with the result that 100 folks donate $100?
Both cases gross $10,000. But the former nets your nonprofit $10,000 minus significant SEO costs — and the latter nets $10,000 without. Good strategy and sound design always beat SEO — but it’s often harder to rationalize and explain because of the data-driven mindset established by big social.
To put more of a fine point on it, companies like Google and Meta make billions of dollars persuading organizations that website engagement is a data-first tactic and that SEO is everything — when we all know that visitors to websites look at design first and care about what they experience online. An organization investing in algorithms over design and content gets data-driven results — but do they know the true cost? It is harder to measure.
I always will urge clients to think about brand, design, UX and content before ever worrying about SEO.
A poorly designed website with great SEO leads to… great SEO.
Can I get a resolution here?
I thought I would round out this year, by writing about the top four miscalculations I see designers doing right now related to technology, design practices and attitudes — and short resolutions for addressing them. There are probably more like 10 but, but let’s face it, you have better things to do right now, dear designer! Spend time with your family for G-d’s sake! Stop reading!
Trusting big social. If you’re still on the Twitter, it’s time to go. It’s a toxic hellscape. I didn’t delete my account yet but it’s been dormant for a long time. I will do so in the next month or so. We need your energy to be focused on critical thinking and inspiring others. Twitter, and most social media, are grotesquely abusing their power, absorbing your ideas and selling us back pure garbage. Lots of designers have moved to Bluesky, which is a relatively decent indie social platform. Better yet, try Mastodon, a free, federated and mostly unfettered platform. Though, I’ve had little traction there this past year, it is a pretty inviting and unexplored space. I know how powerful Instagram is for us visual folks, but in 2025, I encourage you to look into alternative platforms to post your images and ideas.
Making little time for personal projects. As I’ve mentioned previously, it took me many months to get up the gumption to start writing again. I suffered from a lack of faith in myself and a lack of trust in what I had to offer. I decided to publish this newsletter anyway, hook or by crook, with the hope that it might bring some new light or heat to the design community. It was the best decision I made in 2024. It’s not only given me an opportunity to explore ideas I’ve bottled up privately for years. It’s also given me a chance to examine again technology and design’s ethical intersections: AI, static sites and accessibility interest me most. I encourage you to take the time to work on a project that will fuel you personally. Need some ideas? Ask a friend. Or another designer. Or an AI, which can privately help channel your interests and proclivities into something realistic and point you in the right direction. I’ve learned the hard way that pouring all of your expertise into only working for others makes for limited and deadened creative responses to the world. You have a lot to give. Give it to yourself first.
Not heeding social design. There is more to design than typography, grids and satisfying obscure client demands. Social design — using design for social good, social justice or social impact — will be ever more important in the years to come. For 150 years, design had a social purpose — to cajole, to entertain and to sell — but its most powerful use value has been to influence, to inform and to inculcate. From communism to climate, design has been at the forefront of fomenting all significant social change. If you don’t have a particularly political bent, look into design’s evolving ethical standards, especially around accessibility and sustainability. Two weeks ago, the W3C, which is the international governing body of everything web, released its impressive Ethical Web Principles.
Us ethical web folks have been promoting these precepts for years but it’s heartening to see them live at the W3C site now. We are navigating a decisive decade, and designers have urgent decisions to make. Our considerable skillsets can be transferred from enabling a take-make-waste culture to accelerating a reduce-redesign-reuse culture. I like Sarah Housley’s recent view:
It's getting harder for designers to sleep at night. As global warming starts to continuously exceed 1.5 degrees celsius [link original], the industries that promote and enable consumerism – including advertising and marketing, but also design — face a clear choice: to radically reorient, or continue to be complicit in the triple planetary crisis.Ignoring that which is spiritual in our work. This is the hardest one for us designers to get our minds around. The basis of all art-making, from those carmine handprints in the caves of Europe to the abject abstractions of modernity, is the effort to make sense of who we are and why we we exist in the middle of a remote stretch of space on a little rock that is mostly deep water. As wildly successful as our science has been, we simply don’t know anything about the logic of existence, the nature of consciousness, how reality is transmitted to us, or when we come into being and how we depart. We have been making wild speculations about what we are made of and how it all comes together into what we experience as everyday existence.
Over this next year, I encourage you to take some time to sit and just watch. To appreciate how marvellous the inner workings of your mind are and how fantastic it is that each of us has a few years to enjoy it in these bodies. You are an artist, dear designer. Remember that your work is part of that deep tradition of asking the question why — not simply answering the questions of how and when.
I realize that this all could sound moralistic and admonishing. But in writing, I am making these cases to myself first, confirming my own identity as a designer and reminding myself that there is work to do. This next year, I will do my best to drink my own medicine — getting off of big social, making time for my own work, studying social design, and luxuriating in what is.
Very happy holidays to you and all those around you. And go enjoy yourself!
Yours,
Image of the week
Designer, artist and illustrator El Lissitzky crafted this book of poems for Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1923, a few years into the Russian Revolution. A combination of concrete poetry and strong constructivist composition makes for a powerful set of pages — more of which can be seen at Letterform Archive (link above). This is page design as political action. The tabs at right, with their black and red ideograms, apparently allowed the performing reader to easily get to the next poem. This book is a mesmerizing abstraction that is at once highly material and subversively spirited.
Quote of the week
The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.
~ Wassily Kandinsky
Keep up your fine, fine art-making, dear designer. We need you more than you know.
And if Dear Designer has been forwarded to you, by jippity, you can get your very own prized subscription right here.
This was great, Andrew, thank you! We work in different design realms but I love your thoughtfulness and I try to do the same.
Also: I might be willing to do unsavory things to get a hold of that Lissitzky/Mayakovsky book.