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.

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

Nobody cares about ATProto or whether your commits are a damn NFT or some bs just literally improve upon the experience.

That’s it.

It’s as if no company is focusing on the product experience or anybody’s experience anymore. It’s all ooo look what I got I got this I can do that too me me me but nobody will ever buy that.

Say what you want about huge companies like Microsoft or Walmart but they spend a lot of energy understanding the human experience to sell products and less on their own perceived self-aggrandizement.

GitHub is the best version control online and it’s not even close.