The Hard Things About Design

A designer with 20 years of experience analyzes the concrete and structural difficulties unique to design as a profession from 10 perspectives compared with fields such as engineering, sharing the practical concerns and attitudes that come with working as a designer.

1. Infinite Sources of Inspiration and the Absence of Search

• When developers encounter a problem such as a caching issue, they can look for answers within defined spaces such as documentation or forum posts.
• Designers, by contrast, may find a clue to an onboarding problem in an unexpected experience, such as wayfinding from a museum they visited years ago. Inspiration has no fixed boundary, search engine, or answer key.

2. Repetition Does Not Necessarily Shorten the Work

• An engineer who has fixed a similar bug 50 times can resolve the 51st one faster, but a designer may still spend a long time on the 51st onboarding flow after designing 50 of them.
• Each project draws on a completely different combination of references and criteria. Experience does not hand over the answer; it mainly develops a better ability to search.

3. The Pressure of Constant Feedback and Filtering

• Critiquing code requires technical literacy, but anyone who has used a smartphone feels able to offer an opinion about design.
• Feedback from a non-expert can sometimes be the sharpest, yet filtering useful signals from the volume of opinions becomes a significant task of its own.

4. The Fatigue of Repeatedly Defending the Same Decision

• The same design decision may need to be defended five times in a week to different people and in different settings, including critiques, one-on-ones, leadership reviews, and hallway conversations with stakeholders.
• Repeating the same argument becomes tedious even for the designer, and making it sound persuasive every time creates deep fatigue.

5. The Absence of Automation and Manual Quality Control

• Engineers have linters and test suites that automatically detect errors, while a designer's own eyes are often the only quality-control tool available.
• This can lead to reopening a file late at night over a single space or a tiny discrepancy that no one else noticed.

6. Changing Taste and an Endless Definition of Done

• A bug fix is complete when the tests pass, but the standard for design completion depends on the designer's taste.
• As soon as skill reaches the previous standard, taste rises with it, making a genuine sense of completion difficult to achieve.

7. Inspiration Arrives Randomly, Regardless of the Schedule

• Inspiration does not check the calendar, but a scheduled afternoon review still has to happen.
• When ideas do not arrive, designers learn to appear competent and endure the uncertainty until the real idea eventually emerges.

8. Originality, Breaking Rules, and the Importance of Outside Experience

• Design systems and pattern libraries improve proficiency, but they do not create originality.
• Knowing when to break a rule comes from paying close attention to things outside software, such as old films or a 1960s Braun radio.

9. The Recurring Gap Between Taste and Skill

• As Ira Glass observed, taste develops faster than skill, making designers feel that their own work falls short.
• The gap can reopen whenever someone changes jobs or environments because the sensibility developed in one organization may no longer work in another.

10. The Switch in a Designer's Eye

• Once design perception is trained, there is no off switch. Even after work, a designer may find themselves critically examining the kerning and visual elements on a restaurant menu.

Small companies and large companies create different difficulties: the former make it easier to set a standard but leave one person carrying it, while the latter provide more support but demand more compromise. The underlying fatigue remains wherever a designer works.

The author frames this not as a complaint but as an honest acknowledgment of the reality experienced over several decades, concluding that despite all of it, design is still the profession he loves and would choose over any other.