Designers feel the need to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security. So once in a while they'll convince corporate they absolutely HAVE to change everything up for no reason, and they'll spew out pages of poetic nonsensical Gish gallop along with it, to hypnotise everyone into agreeing and let corporate convince themselves that they haven't wasted millions that could have been spent on anything else to benefit the company or, dare I say, humanity.
Ever notice how the more pointless or frivolous a change in design is, the more BS the designers include to back up their case? Think of any of the major design milestones of the last few decades - those striking, arresting works of design that revolutionised society. Did any of those come with a high school C-grade creative writing essay attached to it? Of course not. The design speaks for itself. When you have good design, you feel no need to back it up with a mental gymnastic exercise explaining why it actually is a better design and that everyone who disagrees obviously just doesn't have the intellect to appreciate the artistic vision that you have.
The job of designers is solely to make pretty things. The backup plan of designers is to make people feel good with dopamine-inducing verbiage. In the myriad cases where they fail at their job and produce something ugly and demonstrably worse than the previous version, they go into overdrive with the backup plan in the hopes that their mushy sugar-coated words will hide the bitter taste of their regrettable design choices that they've already spent millions of corporate (and, in some cases, taxpayers'!) budget 'executing'.
Notice also how they try to pass it off as just the natural passing of things, like these things happen, get used to it, as if gratuitous interface changes and jarring layout reshuffles are just a fact of life, like taxes, laundry or fruit flies. Like this idea that one's relationship with a font of all things can "come to a natural end." Again, it's a form of hypnosis. Because God forbid the higher-ups snap out of this trance before they sign off another multi-million-dollar contract for some tacky new coat of paint to be slapped all over the old just for the sake of it.
You see the same with cPanel: "It's time to switch to the Jupiter theme." Says who? Who dictates that "the time has come" in this way, as if it's a universal truth and not something they're coercing us into using? Look at any cPanel forum thread where someone asks why they're forcing this godawful new theme upon us and how exactly it's better. The cPanel staff can never give any meaningful answer to those questions, because there are no reasons. So they repeat the same designer nonsense, or better yet, give no reason at all. And so the design of things continues to get worse, the icons less and less readable, the screen space more and more wasted, the corners more rounded, the jobs of normal working people that little bit harder and more unpleasant as they have to squint for the less-readable icons and moved-around UI elements when the previous version worked perfectly fine and was loved by everyone, all for the sake of the ego of some designer somewhere, who I dare say is very pleased with themselves about making life that little bit worse for everyone else.
That's such a cynic and may I say arrogant take on things and on the important work designers do. One could equally argue engineers refactor code just "to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security". Or Product Managers rejig priority lists only "to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security" etc etc etc
There's a difference between designing because they are designing to please a middle-manager that has directed them to "innovate" in that corporate sphere and design that is meant to be used and enjoyed by an end-user in comfort, i.e. human ergonomics.
A design language fad I hated from day one is MS's Metro design language which Apple also adopted in iOS 7, the format of which is that there must be as much glaring white space as possible, the user must be kept guessing which part of the screen is a button or switch and stab randomly at it until they find it, fonts must be spindly and thin, etc.
Designers feel the need to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security. So once in a while they'll convince corporate they absolutely HAVE to change everything up for no reason, and they'll spew out pages of poetic nonsensical Gish gallop along with it, to hypnotise everyone into agreeing and let corporate convince themselves that they haven't wasted millions that could have been spent on anything else to benefit the company or, dare I say, humanity.
Ever notice how the more pointless or frivolous a change in design is, the more BS the designers include to back up their case? Think of any of the major design milestones of the last few decades - those striking, arresting works of design that revolutionised society. Did any of those come with a high school C-grade creative writing essay attached to it? Of course not. The design speaks for itself. When you have good design, you feel no need to back it up with a mental gymnastic exercise explaining why it actually is a better design and that everyone who disagrees obviously just doesn't have the intellect to appreciate the artistic vision that you have.
The job of designers is solely to make pretty things. The backup plan of designers is to make people feel good with dopamine-inducing verbiage. In the myriad cases where they fail at their job and produce something ugly and demonstrably worse than the previous version, they go into overdrive with the backup plan in the hopes that their mushy sugar-coated words will hide the bitter taste of their regrettable design choices that they've already spent millions of corporate (and, in some cases, taxpayers'!) budget 'executing'.
Notice also how they try to pass it off as just the natural passing of things, like these things happen, get used to it, as if gratuitous interface changes and jarring layout reshuffles are just a fact of life, like taxes, laundry or fruit flies. Like this idea that one's relationship with a font of all things can "come to a natural end." Again, it's a form of hypnosis. Because God forbid the higher-ups snap out of this trance before they sign off another multi-million-dollar contract for some tacky new coat of paint to be slapped all over the old just for the sake of it.
You see the same with cPanel: "It's time to switch to the Jupiter theme." Says who? Who dictates that "the time has come" in this way, as if it's a universal truth and not something they're coercing us into using? Look at any cPanel forum thread where someone asks why they're forcing this godawful new theme upon us and how exactly it's better. The cPanel staff can never give any meaningful answer to those questions, because there are no reasons. So they repeat the same designer nonsense, or better yet, give no reason at all. And so the design of things continues to get worse, the icons less and less readable, the screen space more and more wasted, the corners more rounded, the jobs of normal working people that little bit harder and more unpleasant as they have to squint for the less-readable icons and moved-around UI elements when the previous version worked perfectly fine and was loved by everyone, all for the sake of the ego of some designer somewhere, who I dare say is very pleased with themselves about making life that little bit worse for everyone else.