Elizabeth Goodspeed on the rise of the designer as influencer

It’s worth asking not just whether to post, but what kinds of exposure feel worth giving.

We’ve all seen designers apologise for tacking selfies onto work announcements to boost engagement; algorithms prioritize faces, not fonts. The more you perform, the more visible you become, and the more performance the system demands (ad infinitum).

Many “designer” influencers barely do, or show, any actual design work at all. Instead, they build credibility by performing proximity to design, like posting brand guidelines from major rebrands or reacting to industry news like a hovering art director. Online, it’s easy to look like an authority on design without making very much of it.

Where once a designer might have been hired to create packaging or campaigns behind the scenes, many are now brought forward as faces of collaborations – they’re photographed in their studios and interviewed about their process as part of launch. The designer’s body, personality, and public profile become a commercial asset. Like the long-running o... See more

WIP was now a kind of soft production, and uploading half-baked concepts and early explorations became a genre in itself. The finished product – if it was made at all – mattered less than the ongoing stream of updates.

personal data itself became fodder for designers. Long before the era of Spotify Wrapped and Strava PRs, information designer Nicholas Felton’s Feltron Reports (2005-2014) tracked his meals, conversations, music choices, and much, much, much more to create multi-page, one man “annual reports.” Dear Data (2015), by Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi,... See more

40 Days of Dating, a joint project by Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman created in 2013, was presented as a kind of art-directed relationship experiment: two friends, both single, agreed to date each other for 40 days (40 days being the purported time needed to build a habit). The project was presented through highly polished daily updates with lus... See more

“As with the rise of reality TV in the 2010s, personal disclosure became parasocial currency.”

If the early modernists sold method and mastery, this next wave began inserting personal stakes more clearly; client briefs still set the parameters, but designers were claiming more space within them.