In the sea of sameness

"The rise of Tailwind, design system templates, and other dev frameworks has made it easier than ever to achieve visually appealing designs, often without the need for a designer's hands. Out-of-the-box components, elegant icons, and ready-to-apply CSS are now within reach for whoever desires. This abundance has made programming life easier while speeding up the design process, but it also appears to dull creative thinking."

"Alongside trends that come and go, sameness has become the default state. The spark of the past has faded in many aspects, far beyond the digital sphere: quirky tech brand logos have turned banal, social networks media wear the same interface, and web design is.. well, web design. Furthermore, the authentic self might vanish soon, as we're already in a prompt-of-a-button era, allowing us to create nearly identical outputs."

"We're now making design harder with all these "rules" and unnecessary design tool features making it more difficult to understand basic design. We want to sound smart. Look smart. Now it's just designers designing for other designers. @DannPetty · Sep 10 2022 As design became a subset of the product-startup terra-firma, we've gone from cultivating taste to worshipping metrics. Data-driven culture, while useful for rationalizing business decisions, has skewed priorities away from craft and toward technocracy."

Modern design tools and dev frameworks provide out-of-the-box components, icons, and CSS that simplify creating visually appealing interfaces without a designer. This convenience accelerates development but dampens creative thinking and encourages homogenized outputs. Cultural and product pressures have led to sameness across brands, social platforms, and web interfaces, while prompt-driven generation risks erasing individual authenticity. Accumulated rules and feature bloat in design tools obscure basic principles, often resulting in designers optimizing for peers and metrics rather than craft. Data-driven priorities can displace taste and craft; metrics are useful but not an absolute guide to meaningful design.

Read at Productidentity