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Design Twitter is a paradox.
On a good day, it feels like a global studio. You see generous tear-downs, thoughtful portfolio feedback, people openly sharing how they think, not just what they ship. You feel less alone. You feel seen.
Scroll a little longer and it turns: Hustle culture dressed up as advice. Gatekeeping framed as "standards." Career theater masquerading as wisdom. Enough impostor syndrome fuel to power a small nation.
Design Twitter isn't evil, not in and of itself. But it is distorted and the longer you stay inside it without understanding the game, the easier it is to confuse the performance of design with the practice of it.
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Most people look at a home screen and see a layout. I see a conversation between the product and the user.
When I designed Craftly a marketplace for Nigerian creators, caterers, and artisans the first question I asked wasn't "what should this look like?" It was "who is coming to this screen and what do they need to feel in the first 3 seconds?"
Two users. Two cards. Two colours. Purple slows you down. Amber moves you forward. Colour as navigation, not decoration.
The full-bleed photography on the category page triggers appetite before a user reads a single price. The "continue where you left off" component exists because marketplace decisions take days, not minutes.
This is what I mean when I say I don't design screens. I design decisions
Great work!
Why design if AI can create the same thing in 10% of the time it takes you?
These 3 designs took more than 1.5h to conceptualize, copywrite and draft as a sample piece for a client.
Doing it with AI might've taken 5min. It'll be clunky and probably slightly ugly, sure, but no one's gonna notice... right?
Turns out, everyone can tell. The value prop we, as designers, have is creative freedom and actual human touch. Designs synthesized from nothing but understand of the client's desired outcomes, perfected with years of experience and understanding of color theory and layout principles. Rather than slop created from the same templates AI has been fed with.
And that is something AI can't replace, at least, not in the next 5 years (hopefully).
What do you think?
A few mascotte tests that sadly will never see the light of day. Client decided to stick to "normal" branding. 😭
It is certainly their loss! This would've been such a memorable mark. Love it :D
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