Click bait. That's it. Edgy, edgy click bait.

I stopped following them on Twitter after they starting taking ad-dollars from fiverr ($5/logo!). also, they've never met a "these 32 NFL team logos, redesigned" submission they didn't like.

To hell with those charlatans.

It really comes down to the fact Fast Co. have no idea what they are talking about whenever they talk about design.

Fast Company magazine in the 90s' (original print edition) covered mostly "smart businesses" and dotcom companies. We all know how that went down. "Design Thinking" (or design in general) is the rage among the new generation of "smart businesses" these days of course they have to talk about design.

Yes, this is awful criticism. But it doesn't invalidate design criticism as a valid and useful practice.

Here are some primers on design criticism:

• Criticism and the Armchair Fallacy is a framework on design criticism.

• Critical Sharks is an ongoing series on criticism in interface design.

Because here’s the thing: all of these things are someone’s work. Someone worked their asses off on most of this stuff.

Since when does "Someone worked their asses off on most of this stuff" absolve you from criticism?

Obviously negativity for negativity's sake shouldn't be encouraged, but if you can back up your opinion then criticism can be a positive thing in my opinion.

I didn't think designers read/looked at FastCoDesign, and didn't think FastCoDesign was targeted towards designers. It's a whole lot of "what people who aren't designers think design is about, and designers are into".

Do they have any writers who are designers or have an education in design? It would be a little disappointing if the answer is yes.

As a designer who worked in an editorial/dev capacity for Co.Design for a few months, there's something I want to point out :

Co.Design publishes good writing, but it doesn't get much traffic. Traffic is a metric of success for ad-driven online publications. That's the nature of the beast. You can learn a lot from reading Co.Design every day. Shaunacy Ferro, in particular, publishes some great architecture pieces. But a publication can't fund that writing without the traffic that comes from things like click-bait brackets.

Co.Design is written about design, but it's not written for designers. The audience for general interest design writing on a check-back-everyday schedule wants different content than a Designer News readers might. To suggest otherwise is somewhat patronizing. Working there was the hardest way to learn UX lesson number one: You are not your user. I really struggled with that and eventually I left.

I also want to point out that Michael's piece falls into the same easy criticism category that a lot of Co.Design pieces do. He could've learned a lot from simply reaching out and talking to one of the writers or editors there. Nobody is perfect, and it's incredibly difficult to write 500 perfect words, with a perfect, accurate, shareable headline, twice a day. The writers and editors who put their names on these pieces, more than anyone, are aware of that.

So you can point at the writers, or the editors, and you can point at the readers for not sharing the right stories and you can point at the Internet, but in the end everything's complicit. Saying that Co.Design has a responsibility to spend 100 percent of its resources educating is a bit like getting mad when Google shuts down another free side project. A business is a business. The great thing about the web is that we have tons of other news sources and we can ignore the channels that we don't like.

While the tone of this article is quite aggressive and somewhat offputting as a direct result (expletives aren't always necessary), very good points are raised. The huge quantities of negativity in FastCoDesign's journalism isn't helpful.

I don't think that they hate design, Criticism is good!

This post was hilarious! http://www.fastcodesign.com/3043419/what-the-apple-watch-does-that-googles-watches-dont

Hmm, pot and kettle here.

The reasoning probably has to do with the thinking behind this video that's been making the rounds the past couple days.