[TeMPOraL]

> You used to have to either care enough to do the design yourself or find someone who cared and specialized in that to do it for you.

You think most UI/UX designers, or the artists creating slop for content marketing spam factories for the past decades, cared? Some, maybe. Most probably had higher ambitions, but are doing what actually pays their bills.

It's similar to software developers. Most of those being paid to code couldn't care less, they're in there for the fat paycheck; everyone else mostly complains the work is boring or dumb (or worse), but once you have those skills, it makes no economic sense to switch careers (unless, of course, you're into management, or into playing the entrepreneurship roulette).

[idle_zealot]

I think the more you industrialize a process, the more those involved become cogs (or get replaced with actual or metaphorical cogs in a machine). This is fine, even desirable, for anything we can produce en masse and apply quality control to. I do not mind that my rivets and screws are not artisanal. We figured out how to make a useful and reliable widget and can churn them out on an industrial scale no problem. I do not see the value in doing the same with software. We already get mass-production for free because the product is bytes. Why are we industrializing the process of making millions of variations of the same thing? Surely the effort would be better spent finding the "screw" of software, perfecting it, and making it trivial for users to accomplish whatever task they want without having to generate the gaps between with untested code. I want modularity and better design, not automated design.

[jimbokun]

I do think they cared.

The paychecks weren’t great. Everyone was offering to pay designers with “exposure”. If they didn’t innately care about the field they would have done something more lucrative.