Design is dead, and we killed him.
2050. It’s a windy December night. Christmas is around the corner, and I feel cozy with my hot cup of coffee and my favorite Lo-Fi playlist. Everything seems perfect. Everything seems in the right place. Then, a voice. A voice whispers: “You have killed it”.

“What have I killed?” I ask perplexed.

A long silence.

“Design.” responds the voice.

I don’t understand. Design is great nowadays: websites are wonderful, apps even more. Why is this creepy voice telling me that I killed design?

I had to further investigate, so I asked the voice of her reasons.

“Usability” whispers calmly.

Well, that word made me chill. Memories started to flow in my mind while I was paralyzed in front of my computer. There was a time, many years ago, when designers used to say that term: Usability. It meant a lot in the past, and was a fundamental part of our lives. There were a lot of platforms and websites where you could learn about “usability”, like Medium or W3C.

The Usability Era.

Those times were indeed strange: designers cared about the user experience and designed websites according to it. I can even remember that people were tested on prototypes before developing platforms. Ages of darkness, in which absurd guidelines like accessible fonts, sizes, and contrast were law. Can you even imagine designing a website with all this tomfoolery?

Can you recall websites where scrolling was set on default, and no script interfered with the user? Horror. Horror to my eyes. But thanks to our two omnipotent Lords, Dribbble and Awwwards, everything changed.

The Aesthetic Era

The voice said that I (or we) killed design. Clearly, this is the speech of a heretic. Design got blessed with the Word of our Lords and, finally, peace flooded the world.

Design brought us ten commandments, and I hope you can recite them with me. You can’t? Well, don’t say that where someone can hear you. Now let me recite them backward for you.

10. Always in the name of our Lords, use left-side drawers in app design.

This is important: most people are right-handed, and their thumb can’t reach the left part of the new generation screens. In fact, you don’t want the user to access the app menu, Don’t you?
['Lorenzo Doremi']
['Visual Design', 'UX', 'Design', 'Technology', 'Web Development']