I Think Social Media Has Made Design Worse

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think social media has made design worse.

I know that's not necessarily what a designer with an Instagram account is supposed to say, but I don't think we should pretend it hasn't changed the way we work.

When I started designing, you didn't have access to an endless stream of other people's work. You found things in books, magazines, exhibitions and wherever else you happened to look. You spent more time making things and less time looking at what everyone else was making. Now we're constantly looking. And I think it gets into your head.

You see the same typefaces, the same colours, the same layouts and the same beautifully presented brand identities coming around again and again. Something becomes popular, everyone notices it, and six months later we're all wondering why everything looks strangely familiar.

AI is going to make this even more…..interesting. I'm not against AI. I think it's an incredible tool and I'm genuinely interested in what it can do. What concerns me is what happens when we combine it with a culture that already rewards speed, quantity and visual familiarity.

We can now make an almost unlimited amount of perfectly acceptable design, very quickly. That's impressive, but I'm not sure perfectly acceptable is what we're after.

The thing I value most in design is an idea. A proper idea. Something that makes me stop and think, "I've not seen that before."

I worry that younger designers are being exposed to so much finished work, and now so much AI-generated work, before they've had enough time to develop their own instincts. You can learn a lot by looking, but you also need to make terrible things. You need to get things wrong. You need to have ideas that don't work and occasionally stumble across something that does.

I'm not anti-social media and I'm certainly not anti-AI. I just don't want either of them to become the creative director.

I'd rather see something slightly odd and completely original than another piece of beautifully presented design that I've already seen twenty times this week.