Dribbble and The Creation of The Useless Designer
The definition of design according to Webster:
“to plan and make (something) for a specific use or purpose”
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I am really confused as to what’s happening on Dribbble lately, I feel like it has completely lost the essence of what design is meant to be about. Yes Dribbble was always a place for aesthetic simulation but it had some sort of connection to actual useful products. Today the Dribbble community grew into desiring complete aesthetic Porn, with “function” going out the window and only caring about “form”. Designers are sitting there for hours trying to make a “shot” beautiful with things like this:
This chart is completely useless, it can’t be implemented as a UI anywhere, it was obviously made just to flex this new trend of “perception/depth” with Yoda, and the BG shadow behind the widget.
Do we need another weather widget? There are 1000s similar shots to this one.
Explore mars?
Another weather concept? No doubt pretty, completely useless though.
As you could see in these design shots, the focus was all aesthetics, there was n0 practice here on how to approach a problem with an interesting twist, or applying a new UI to an existing problem.
Last time I checked design was about solving problems, and that’s why I was excited about becoming a designer. I think we should start penalizing and neglecting designs like the above examples and reward with more “likes” the designers that post different work that has a fresh approach on different problems.
We should try and change this trend as a collective, so that we can become greater and more valuable assets to the development community, instead of sitting there for hours adding 3D effects, and BG images to our shots.
“Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.”
Dieter Rams
