Good isn’t good enough: beware the design middle ground

Strumenti, piattaforme e riferimenti spingono verso le stesse soluzioni. Succede da tempo. Il design tende sempre più all’omologazione e la proliferazione di strumenti accessibili a tutti potrebbe allargare ulteriormente lo spazio occupato dal “medio”. (Questa cosa allo stesso tempo potrebbe essere un bene e un male).

New design tools and platforms that promise speed and ease keep arriving, and honestly, they’re good. New agents, new ways to create, faster every time. Motion, coding, typographic systems, the whole apparatus of what we do keeps getting more democratised. That’s worth celebrating.

But something else is happening alongside this. Design is flattening. Not getting worse, exactly, getting narrower. Less weird. Less range. Less of the thing that only one person, or one challenging brief, or one long night can make.

The democratisation of creativity hasn’t made originality easier. It’s made it rarer. The more the range of outputs shrinks, the wider the middle grows to hold them all. And as the middle grows, the distance to something more distinct grows with it.