I am in a very weird place right now when it comes to design.
I still very much appreciate the craft, if anything I think it's more important than ever. But when it comes to ingesting news and information about the craft of digital design and tools for creation, I just can't help but feel… flat. Not interested in the slightest.
I am closing in on a realization that all my life I wanted to be able to make good software. Since I couldn't program my software, I shifted my effort—and my depth—to design, the one aspect of software I could impact and grow in.
Now that I can make software myself, design feels far less important in terms of the creation process. I often make a “good enough” UX, and just chug along to make the thing useful, and usable.
Back when programming was the hardest part of making software design was considered an afterthought. A nice-to-have.
Then we hada brief period when distribution was the hardest part because software became sort of a commodity through SaaS, so design could be used as a differentiator. Software was still expensive to make, and design had its moment in the spotlight.
Now that programming is a trivial part of the software creation process, design is back to a nice-to-have.
The usefulness of the product was always what was the most important aspect, because if you don't make what the market needs, it's all for nothing.
In a world in which you can make anything, you still have to make something useful.