“Everyone Used to Be a Designer”

A sizeable portion of the layoffs announced at many of the world’s largest tech companies include familiar design-related roles like product and UX designers, IAs, visual designers, UX researchers, content strategists, etc. “Everyone is a designer” is a phrase that has permeated and divided design social media for the better part of the last decade. In the name of ‘specialization’ we embraced over-standardization and spearheaded the commoditization of (visual) design artifacts.