I’ve been doing some type of digital design work since I was a middle schooler in the late 90s. Back then it consisted of building early CSS websites and customizing message boards with friends. It was a hobby through high school, a freelance gig during & after college, and eventually the reason I went back to school to get a BFA, because… well, it just seemed like there was a lot more to it than I could decipher on my own.

(Plus, that Philosophy degree wasn’t exactly “panning out” post-2008)

But many colleagues, and most bosses, never got a degree in design. They didn’t take a long-road through multiple HTML standards, or chase down a myriad of always-changing aesthetic trends… yet they are employed professionals doing just fine for themselves. I bring this difference up not to brag about my numerous undergrad degrees, but because those different paths still led to a similar assumption that design can save the world. And that maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll be the ones to do it.

I’m here to say that’s a load of self-important bullshit.

Design can’t save a product, a company, and definitely not the world. When you get to the root of it, design can only make things more usable / beautiful. It’s the icing, the plate, the utensils… and while all those things can make a dessert appealing and easy to eat, if what’s underneath is a cake shaped pile of shit, nothing will get people to shovel it into their mouths.

Since we recently celebrated the Mac’s 40th anniversary and the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, let’s frame the discussion on Apple’s design-focused history. And we’ll start with the iPhone, since it’s still their bread and butter in 2024. If you rewatch Steve Job’s original keynote, you can put a finger on the handful of moments that truly gripped the audience way back in 2007:

• – Smooth touchscreen scrolling,
• – Slide to unlock,
• – The adaptable on-screen keyboard,
• – And pinch to zoom.

None of these are design solutions… they are engineering, cake-level solutions. Design was involved, making them easy to understand and pleasing to use, but every Android device stole the anesthetic and design within a year or two… it was the functional issues they never quite sorted out. Even today, Android still has the occasional jelly-scrolling issue, most users choose third-party keyboards over what comes standard, and most OEMs from that era are out of the smartphone game today.

What design contributed was the 10% that put those four things over the top. When you swipe down on the top of a page, it allows you to pull it down before snapping back up and reloading the page. When you type on the adaptable on-screen keyboard, the haptics, sound-effects, and pop-up key/letter conveys that you pushed the right button. These things help, and feel natural today, but they were the details not the framework.

If design really could save the world, I think Palm’s webOS would have been as big and important as the iPhone. The Palm Pre’s pebble-shape felt much better in the hand, their slide-out keyboard was familiar to everyone at the time, they brought third-party services into single-apps through a feature called Synergy, it launched with magnet-based wireless charging way back in 2009, and even created the card-based multitasking paradigm that every mobile OS adopted and still uses today.

Palm solved more of the user-focused, design level problems than Android or iOS and beat them to market; but instead of saving the company, being so far ahead ruined them.

My point isn’t that someone should go back in time to save Palm, because they were in trouble before the Pre or webOS. In fact, that was probably the source of designs being so far ahead of their time (a hail mary on 4th down). My point is simply that design alone can’t save us. We, as designers, are part of teams who plan what we sketch, code what we wireframe, and market what we helped create. The work we do is important, but we aren’t superheroes. No one is… and that’s okay… preferable, even!

The weight of the world doesn’t rest on any one team or discipline. It’s shared evenly amongst us all. So, get off your high-horse and stop idolizing assholes.

Collaboration and humility will get you much further in the world than being a lonely rockstar, anyway.

Originally published on Medium as part of the Pixel Pointless publication.