going to be a interesting experiment to see who outsources too much to these tools at the expense of building their own intuition (aka “speed”). if you don’t practice enough design, and train those muscles to trust your intuition when you can actually feel something is good, you won’t know how to use it.
"But we have to be clear-eyed about what we’re optimizing for and what we might be trading away—be that hard-earned knowledge or trust and credibility with a close-knit community of designers." ...this is so on the money. Knowledge & credibility = our ability and reputation, which as designers is *all* we have. Not sure it's worth the risk, to make mood boards a bit faster.
As soon as he said audits taught him nothing, that’s all I needed to know. That’s the friction of learning customer insight — and it’s such an integral part in creating customer-attracting design!!
I haven't quite finished this thought but I believe that our culture is entirely too downstream from what people who make things on screens are saying on Twitter, which exists only on screens, to seek attention for their pieces of software that exist only on screens. The good thing is this means that you can close the Twitter tab and never see this kind of thing (as I do for months at a time) the bad thing is that it promotes a kind of cultural stuckness that can be easily mistaken for progress, or avant-garde.
If you go on the Cluely website, its sold as a fairly mundane 'Live AI Meeting Assistant' -- something that you can decide is for you and download, or move on, like you would on the landing page for a piece of software in 2005, 2015. However in the paralel universe of Twitter in the year 2025, thousands and thousands of hours of people who are smart enough to know better are spent discussing and thinking about this fairly mundane 'Live AI Meeting Assistant' because of the attention seeking advertisements 'CHEAT ON EVERYTHING!' they put together and upload there. Thousands of hours that could have been spent on some other kind of discussion or cultural output.
I think its exactly the mundanity of the tool itself, combined with the fact that software has become entirely too central to our culture (because of its economic scalability) that drives people to this kind of attention seeking behaviour. If the software itself could be interesting, like actual cultural artifacts (albums, books, movies) then none of this would be neccesary -- but I think we've maybe all collectively realised that software actually cannot be that interesting.
Great read! As a designers we are once again moving through a major flux on how we define our job and at the end of the day the deliverables that we produce.
“In a world where being known matters more than knowing, the incentives point toward performance over practice. And we all become performers in someone else’s growth strategy.”
Summarized perfectly. Engagement farming is why I stopped using beloved twitter about 5 years ago & threads soon after launch. It isn’t the content experienced designers are going to learn from, but certainly springboards young ones who need to build a network.
"You become a designer by being known as one" oof that hits home.
going to be a interesting experiment to see who outsources too much to these tools at the expense of building their own intuition (aka “speed”). if you don’t practice enough design, and train those muscles to trust your intuition when you can actually feel something is good, you won’t know how to use it.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. Would highly recommend this read: https://www.ramdane.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Ramdane-Touhami-Towards-an-esthetic-deglobalisation.pdf
in both cases: the problem is moodboards, not how they're made.
i think the problem is how most people think about moodboards in 2025 and what it represents, not the format itself.
"But we have to be clear-eyed about what we’re optimizing for and what we might be trading away—be that hard-earned knowledge or trust and credibility with a close-knit community of designers." ...this is so on the money. Knowledge & credibility = our ability and reputation, which as designers is *all* we have. Not sure it's worth the risk, to make mood boards a bit faster.
le sigh
As soon as he said audits taught him nothing, that’s all I needed to know. That’s the friction of learning customer insight — and it’s such an integral part in creating customer-attracting design!!
I haven't quite finished this thought but I believe that our culture is entirely too downstream from what people who make things on screens are saying on Twitter, which exists only on screens, to seek attention for their pieces of software that exist only on screens. The good thing is this means that you can close the Twitter tab and never see this kind of thing (as I do for months at a time) the bad thing is that it promotes a kind of cultural stuckness that can be easily mistaken for progress, or avant-garde.
If you go on the Cluely website, its sold as a fairly mundane 'Live AI Meeting Assistant' -- something that you can decide is for you and download, or move on, like you would on the landing page for a piece of software in 2005, 2015. However in the paralel universe of Twitter in the year 2025, thousands and thousands of hours of people who are smart enough to know better are spent discussing and thinking about this fairly mundane 'Live AI Meeting Assistant' because of the attention seeking advertisements 'CHEAT ON EVERYTHING!' they put together and upload there. Thousands of hours that could have been spent on some other kind of discussion or cultural output.
I think its exactly the mundanity of the tool itself, combined with the fact that software has become entirely too central to our culture (because of its economic scalability) that drives people to this kind of attention seeking behaviour. If the software itself could be interesting, like actual cultural artifacts (albums, books, movies) then none of this would be neccesary -- but I think we've maybe all collectively realised that software actually cannot be that interesting.
Great read! As a designers we are once again moving through a major flux on how we define our job and at the end of the day the deliverables that we produce.
really good read !
“In a world where being known matters more than knowing, the incentives point toward performance over practice. And we all become performers in someone else’s growth strategy.”
Summarized perfectly. Engagement farming is why I stopped using beloved twitter about 5 years ago & threads soon after launch. It isn’t the content experienced designers are going to learn from, but certainly springboards young ones who need to build a network.