Elizabeth Goodspeed on why graphic designers can’t stop joking about hating their jobs

At last month’s SAG Awards, Timothée Chalamet accepted his Best Actor trophy with a line that felt almost taboo in 2025: “I want to be one of the greats.” The speech went instantly viral – not because it was cringe (though it might be that too), but because it was so unabashedly sincere. After a decade of perfecting ironic distance, people suddenly seemed excited for someone to say, plainly, that they cared about their work and wanted it to mean something.

It’s not hard to see some parallels to design. A decade ago, the field felt purpose-driven and sincere; today, the dominant tone is one of self-effacing detachment. Designers buy hats that say Typography Can Change the World, Just Kidding and slap Graphic Design, Not Worth the Risk stickers on their laptops. They curate Are.na boards titled “I think I actually hate design” and post memes about how depressed they are. As Cam Morris put it on X, it’s hard to think of any other profession where half the people doing it say “don’t become one.” But when did Graphic Design is My Passion become Graphic Design is My Prison? And is the pendulum starting to swing back again? In a culture allergic to sincerity, maybe caring is starting to feel radical again.

To understand how we ended up here, we have to go back a bit. Once upon a time – specifically, around the 2010s – it really seemed like design was poised to change the world. This took two primary forms: the rise of “design thinking,” a vague but seductive process promising to fix any problem with research and Post-it notes; and the idea that aesthetics alone could drive progress by making information clearer and tech more usable. This was the era of what Silvio Lorusso, author of What Design Can’t Do, calls “design panism” – a belief that design, applied broadly enough, could touch everything and solve anything, and that everyone should learn how to do it. Design was more than how something looked. It was how the world would get better.

But no belief system lasts forever. Today, Apple is churning out AI emojis that would make Steve Jobs turn in his grave, and Amazon – the most used website in the world – looks like a bunch of pop-up ads stitched together. Bad design doesn’t appear to hurt their profit margins. Joseph Alessio, a designer and art director based in Oakland, points to the failure of Humane’s AI pin as proof that design no longer carries the cultural clout it once did. “Humane tried to do what Apple did – they hired the same kind of people, ran the same design playbook – and it totally flopped,” he says. “There just wasn’t a niche left to fill. The pitch of a design-driven company doesn’t hit like it used to.” In politics, the shift is even starker. As Shar Biggers, who led the Harris-Walz rebrand, points out, we’ve gone from Obama’s 2008 campaign – whose sleek corporate identity positioned him as modern and forward-thinking while showcasing the power of design itself – to Trump’s chaotic visual identity. No matter: MAGA still outperformed the polished branding of both Clinton and Harris. So much for design thinking.

The cynicism our current moment inspires appears to be, regrettably, universal. For millennials, who watched the better-world-by-design ship go down in real time, it’s hard-earned. We saw the idealist fantasy of creative autonomy, social impact, and purpose-driven work slowly unravel over the past decade, and are now left holding the bag. Gen Z designers have the same pessimism, but arrived at it from a different angle. They’re entering the field already skeptical, shaped by a job market in freefall and constant warnings of their own obsolescence. But the result is the same: an industry full of people who care deeply, but feel let down. As Shar Biggers describes it, designers are “realising that much of their work is being used to push for profit rather than change, making the rich richer, and being manipulated for misinformation. I’m constantly meeting designers who are looking to do work they believe in, and they’ve yet to find an opportunity to do that. And when they do, even that lets them down for numerous reasons.”

The arc of disillusionment for any given designer has become somewhat predictable. As students, designers are encouraged to make expressive, nuanced work, and rewarded for experimentation and personal voice. The implication, of course, is that this is what a design career will look like: meaningful, impactful, self-directed. But then graduation hits, and many land their first jobs building out endless Google Slides templates or resizing banner ads. The disconnect is jarring – not because the work is beneath them, but because no one prepared them for how constrained and compromised most design jobs actually are. We trained people to care deeply and then funnelled them into environments that reward detachment. ​​And the longer you stick around, the more disorienting the gap becomes – especially as you rise in seniority. You start doing less actual design and more yapping: pitching to stakeholders, writing brand strategy decks, performing taste. Less craft, more optics; less idealism, more cynicism.

For most of us, design didn’t start as just a job. It began as a passion, a hobby, a way of making sense of the world. Our emotional connection to design doesn’t just disappear once the work becomes paid labour. “It’s really difficult to suppress the emotional attachment to the passionate co-creation of a vision for something larger than just yourself,” says designer Mira Joyce. “For better or worse, I find myself deeply attached to the designs and images I make – even in the most corporate and tech client dynamics.” Unfortunately, that emotional attachment doesn't prevent the job market from treating us as interchangeable pawns – easily replaced by a cheaper freelancer, a junior hire, or increasingly, a machine. That tension – between feeling like your work defines you and being reminded how little power you have – is exhausting. You start off doing work you love, and somewhere along the way, the work becomes a performance of loving it. Once your identity is tied up in the performance, it’s hard to admit when it stops feeling good.

At the same time, designers are expected to constantly curate a public-facing identity: to brand themselves, stay visible, and make it all look effortless. “It started getting into everyone’s brains,” Mira Joyce says of the online design scene of the 2010s. “If you’re cool, you never self-identify as being cool.” Personal branding became a kind of silent arms race, one where self-promotion had to be strategic but appear spontaneous. Irony and sarcasm became tools to manage that contradiction, making it seem like the thought put into self-presentation was just naturally easy. “If you took a course on personal branding,” she adds, “would you tell anybody about it? Absolutely not! That’s so embarrassing.”

Drew Litowitz, co-host with James Chae of the Graphic Support Group podcast, which “explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of design practice,” points out that design is one of the few professions where your output is always on display. “The tangibility and the proof-is-in-the-pudding nature of the portfolio or social media asset is very different from a lot of other types of work,” he says. Designers are constantly showcasing little snapshots of who they are, with each project serving as a stand-in for their taste, their intelligence, their worth. No wonder so many designers aren’t sure how to express what they feel.

At this point, it’s impossible to tell how anyone actually thinks about design. People post memes about how much they hate the industry even as they go into debt for an MFA and grind out late-night passion projects. Even expressions of sincerity are padded with disclaimers (“sorry to sincere-post...”) as if real emotion needs a trigger warning. Meanwhile, LinkedIn bros are dropping paragraphs about “finding purpose through branding” twice a day. The line between optimism and pessimism is increasingly blurred; designers are ironic about being sincere, sincere about being ironic, suspicious of optimism, but also wary of coming off as too cynical (or, sad). What’s being performed, more than anything, is ambivalence: the most protective emotional position in a profession that demands passion but punishes vulnerability. When the stakes are this personal, forced indifference can feel like the only safe response.

Self-deprecation can be a helpful mask for how deeply designers actually care. The jokes about hating clients are bits as well as coping mechanisms. It’s easier to feign apathy than to admit how much energy goes into a project that might get killed in a Slack thread. Irony becomes a way to preempt disappointment, to insulate yourself from how personal this work can feel. Some clearly still love what they do but perform exhaustion as a form of self-protection. Others feel disillusioned but are reluctant to admit how deeply they once bought in, or how much they're struggling. Self-deprecation might also be one of the few ways designers can reconcile the contradiction between having a cushy job and feeling totally burned out by it. “There aren’t a lot of jobs that are easier than being a designer,” says Joseph Alessio. “We’re in air-conditioned spaces, working on computers. The worst thing that could happen is your neck hurts from looking at your laptop too much.” Speaking as someone whose neck does hurt from sitting at a computer all day – he’s not wrong. Some people literally wake up at 3am to fight fires! Healthcare and education workers are watching their budgets get gutted! In that context, complaining about design feels like bad PR. Even when the industry is clearly guilty of labour abuses, discrimination, and chronic burnout, designers still feel the need to couch their frustration in a punchline.

Of course, not everyone gets to joke about hating their job. Public sarcasm in design only really works when it’s coming from someone with a strong portfolio. RGD and Dan Cassaro of Young Jerks can get away with posting memes instead of client case studies because they’ve already established the quality of their work and a baseline of financial studio success. But for those still trying to prove themselves, joking about burnout or saying “design is fake” can sound less like a wink and more like a red flag. There’s a privilege to irony – it assumes your competence is a given. The ones allowed to be flippant are usually the ones with a track record. Everyone else has to play it straighter, or risk being mistaken for someone who actually doesn’t care.

There’s a meme going around that says, “Job market so bad I started following my dreams.” It works as a punchline, but it also doubles as a manifesto. The collapse of design’s stability and power has forced a lot of people to rethink why they’re designing at all. If the industry no longer offers security, prestige, or even clout, then who is all this self-styling for? Why not do the thing that feels worthwhile, and be honest about how much it matters to us? As Mira Joyce puts it, “Caring deeply and openly about your craft shouldn’t feel embarrassing. It feels necessary to me.”

Of course, no amount of personal reframing will fix the underlying problems with our industry. The only real solution is collective action: better labour protections, less exploitation, more equitable leadership. But part of the work, too, is untangling our own emotional entrapment. Getting clear on what design means to us, and what it doesn’t have to mean anymore. “It’s worth spending time to dissect and unpack what kind of relationship you have with your work,” Chae says. “It’s valid to build an identity expressed through it, but often we make the mistake of constructing that into a mask.”

Sincerity isn’t about loving design again. It’s about letting go of the idea that you have to hate it just to protect yourself – that it’s ok to want to be one of the greats. Caring doesn’t have to be visible to be real, and it doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be radical. In a field where irony is the norm, a little bit of unguarded sincerity can go a long way.