The Misplaced Blame Game in Design
It's time to let designers and creative small businesses off the hook
I want to make the case that designers and creative companies are not at fault for the grave mistakes and misadventures occurring on our planet, despite the hum. (Like last week’s post, I unfortunately sound a little like the Voice of America, offering support for the creative economy during the times of the iron curtain.)
A colleague of mine recently pointed me to a number of articles in UX Planet, a Medium-powered blog of medium utility. UX Planet is a popular collection of posts with 342,000 followers. And yet many of their recent posts — and ones by like-minded design blogs, magazines and organization these days — are positioned against design, against designers, or against the companies that support designers. There are some designers that, yes, argue against the value of design and the work of designers. Other designers have blamed designers for some of the worst perversions of our culture.
Here are a few recent articles, in case you want to dig in.
So, you really want to become a UX Designer in 2025?: A clickbait screed that says it’s difficult to become a designer but you can do it anyway.
Why I Stopped Applying For UX Jobs (And Why You Likely Will, Too): A purposeless post about how hard it is to be a designer these days. It’s also rife with AI-generated images lol.
Why Nobody Wants to Pay for Graphic Design Anymore: A throw-up-your-hands piece that argues we should “specialize in something cool” like, say, NFTs.
I know these are just articles on Medium. I know that this is a short and curated list. But designers and creative employers are reading them.
The tone of these articles is that designers are doing something wrong, that you, dear designer, are not keeping up with the times, that you are to blame for your inability to find a “UX job”. Some articles go even further, making designers out to be selfish or directionless. (For a countervailing voice, see Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you.)
Yes. We can blame some high-minded designers for stoking the attention economy. They are a critical part of the industrial protocols that sweeten the apps we worship daily. These folks, especially those most talented and craven designer directors sitting in tall towers in Silicon Valley, have indeed done damage to our social fabric, refining our smartphones to serve fast scrolls faster and to promote the promise of our techno-lords. Yes.
But. Designers actually represent a very small group of people. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are approximately 213,000 graphic designers in the States, with California and New York having the largest share. I can’t quite verify this number but, in Canada, there are about 24,000 graphic designers; this holds up statistically given that the country is about one tenth the size in population.
And. Designers earn on average around $78,000 per year in the U.S. and $66,000 per year in Canada. In the past couple of years, with the advance of template design, the rise of AI, the surfeit of students emerging from design schools, and the realities of a post-Covid economy, there are now far fewer jobs for designers, art directors and others — and when they do become available, the application process can be akin to surviving Squid Game. One design agency owner I know had over 1,200 applications for the creative director position they advertised.
It’s not just anecdotal. Here is the job outlook for designers for 2024-2033 from the Canadian Occupational Projection System (COPS):
STRONG RISK OF SURPLUS: This occupation is expected to face a strong risk of labour surplus over the period of 2024-2033 at the national level. Because the occupation was showing moderate signs of surplus conditions in the recent years, and the projected flow of job seekers is expected to noticeably exceed the projected flow of job openings, the occupation is expected to face a strong risk of surplus during the projection period. [Note that COPS indicates that design employment in Canada 2023 was 93,200. Your mileage may vary.]
So if the world is on fire, it cannot be designers who are to blame. Despite our outsized capacity to influence the direction of our world, we make too little, have little political and economic power, and control so little of our own day-to-day work.
It is a privilege to be a designer but designers are not privileged.
Where does this leave us, dear designer? Today, I want to let you off the hook. If you are a designer, a studio founder, an agency owner, a design consultant or a UX professional, or if you are a government or corporate employer with a design team, or if you are a small business that relies on designers, you have done the best that you could with what you have been given. Don’t listen to the voices telling you that you are responsible for not being able to find jobs, for earning so little, for not learning fast enough, for not responding to market demands — or worse, for harming the planet.
We are, by and large, doing the hard work of facilitating, challenging and adapting — with little recognition, recompense and recourse.
Thanks for reading.
Yours,
Image of the Week
We designers are an inherently self-referential bunch. This is a photo from a 1926 Czech book of poems about letters formed by artists posing as those letters — letterform dance compositions. This radical book of text and photomontage (what László Moholy-Nagy called typophoto) is called Abeceda by Milča Mayerová, a brilliant dancer and choreographer who died in 1977. Here we have “K”.
Quote of the week
Zoom in and obsess. Zoom out and observe. We get to choose.
~ Rick Rubin
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