The first in a 2 part series about shit that doesn't really matter....

"The team considered 300 icons in all"

"Total disregard for the process." (Implying this mess is worthy of being called a process)

"All those explorations were actually up on the walls all over their office"

"a subtle cue to anyone that watches, which says, "Hey, we did a ton of work and this didn't happen by accident!"

How did we get here?

At what point did designers working in tech/startups decide this was in any sense a sane way to design?

Why are we supposed to praise them for throwing shit at the wall in the form of several hundred arbitrary variations of a camera glyph?

This idea that somehow putting everything on walls so the whole office can stick their oar in is asinine. It's pure design by committee.

Throwing shit at a wall to have it judged by committee is still just a popular piece of shit on a wall.

"Have some fucking empathy. Everyone is trying hard."

I'm not going to have empathy for someone doing their job, but I will pity their misspent effort when a more appropriate solution could have been achieved in a fraction of the time with clearer creative vision and management.

Designing 300 logo variations for ANY brand isn't creative direction, it's a full on creative train derailment going straight off a cliff and head on into a preschool. It's laughable that any designer in these companies signs up for this shambles of a process and genuinely believes just because they're passing a pile of glyph colour and border radius treatments daily that it's somehow well invested design time.

Funny how if someone perceives that a design didn't take much work, it's not good. How do I make something look like it took A LOT of work?

Taking too much effort to achieve something poorly doesn't make it good. Plenty of well regarded design classics didn't take a lot of work. It's the finished product that matters and if it's poor then pointing to the mountain of rejected ideas isn't going to make it any better.

Why does Eli hate everything

I literally sighed and felt pain when I saw this on the DN Feed

I was expecting this post. I was expecting this hyperbolic tone.... I was expecting this to be on the front page of DN. I was expecting a backlash in the comments. DN community - change it up!

"This is my version of Design and whoever doesn't follow it is wrong"

The Mary Whitehouse of design is back.

Who cares about what this guy has to complain? Oh, I'm sorry — I mean... critique. Look at his site. Is he going to write about how old and not-attractive his site looks?

Clickbait strikes again

A curious thing about the new icon: because it feels more casual, I've been tapping on it more often. It's certainly bold on my screen, compared to many other simple icons on white. I think with the previous icon, it had a feeling of a utility or tool, almost like it might require work to interact with.

The camera icon in the actual tab bar is also reduced a lot now, and one could argue that they no longer have to encourage content creation: the argument is already made.

Despite how long this branding lasts or what's to come, I think Instagram is actually on to something relevant for the brand as it exists today, in my opinion.

Hot takes here! Get em while they're hot!

I genuinely enjoyed this and most of Eli's other articles. I may not agree with everything he says and the tone may be snarky, but they're still better informed and backed up than the majority of articles that pander to the existing status-quo.

Someone should let the author know that modernism, while it had a good run, came to an end in the 40's-50's.

This is modern:

The second I saw Instagram's new icon and black/white interface I already knew that Eli was going to have a field day. I never expected it to be a trilogy.

Watch your back Eli.

Haha, I thought this might give the old boy a palpitation.