So wide of the mark that I almost feel faint. Selected highlights: > This cult is insidious. Its two main tenant are: 1. The designer is always right. 2. If yo

So wide of the mark that I almost feel faint. Selected highlights: > This cult is insidious. Its two main tenant are: 1. The designer is always right. 2. If you don’t like what the designer is doing, you’re wrong, and you should go somewhere else. Doesn’t sound very friendly, does it? 1. Couple of fallacies here: you've set up a scenario in which your conclusion is supported (gosh, that doesn't sound friendly! This guy's a genius!), but it's also ignoratio elenchi: it doesn't fucking matter whether it's friendly or not, because who gives a shit whether the philosophy by which you design a product is friendly or not? It's like asking whether the philosophy is crunchy or gooey. 2. I would argue that if the designer is doing their job properly and working with and for users, then they will be usually right, and if you don't like it, you're wrong, and you should go somewhere else (because you're probably a neckbearded engineer trying to design something with zero user empathy). > Steve Jobs made a zillion bucks cramming his design decisions down peoples’ throats. 1. In the same way as any designer, living or dead, who has shipped something to consumers, was "cramming [their] design decisions down peoples' throats." 2. In addition to the hugely biased language used, it's a gross oversimplification of design at Apple. A good example of Steve Jobs designing something is the iDVD anecdote. The iDVD team spend weeks working on a user interface that they think works. Jobs comes into the meeting, stops them halfway through, ignores their complicated workflows, and draws a simple rectangle which has a single "BURN" button on it. His great skill wasn't design, but editing and empathy. > and now one of its founders spends his days custom-building and racing F1 cars. Just another casual misrepresentation. DHH has not retired and is still working hard at 37signals. > They did all this by being design dictators. Yes. Forget the brilliant engineering, marketing, thought leadership, branding, etc. It was this cult thing you've conjured out of nowhere. > Steve Jobs had a vision, and if you didn’t like his vision, you could go home. Yes. But a vision is nothing to do with design. Example: Steve Jobs had the vision for MobileMe/iCloud. The vision was a cloud-based software product that allowed you to synchronise your devices and keep data across all of them. The design is terrible. Design being architecture and the implementation. Vision != design. And what do you mean by "go home"? Isn't the same true of any product? If you don't like Android you can "go home". If you don't like Ferrari you can "go home". With "go home" you're implying that the consumer loses out. In reality because there IS ONLY ONE WAY A PRODUCT CAN POSSIBLY WORK, you're criticising them for not disrupting the space time continuum in order to offer two different products so you can not like Steve Jobs' vision and still like Steve Jobs' vision. Fuck me. > 37 Signals made its products like it wanted to, and if you didn’t like it, you could suck it. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I'm giving up on the rest.