I think I get asked some version of the same question almost every day:
What do you think is going on in the graphic design industry?
Thankfully, it usually arrives via an online message, so I do not have to respond in real time. I can take a breath. And usually, as I let that breath out, my mind splinters into a thousand tiny thoughts, and I lose the energy to answer honestly. But one thought returns more than any other: Chip Kidd's novel The Cheese Monkeys.
If you have read The Cheese Monkeys, you know the Sorbeckism: "Good is dead." In the novel, a young designer in training discovers that talent and taste are not enough and that serious design demands discipline, precision, and a standard far higher than merely being "good." The book is funny, strange, and obsessive, often reading like a statement of purpose for design education and creative ambition. Kidd paints a heightened design-school experience in which brutal standards and strange assignments break down the way his characters see, think, judge, and make things. The lesson is simple and painful: real creative growth usually begins with having your assumptions dismantled.
There is a hard truth in that. "Good" is not the goal if better, sharper, stranger, or greater is still possible. "Good" is a dangerous resting place. It is where bad designers stop pushing.
I think of that book because I cannot help but notice how far we, as an industry, have strayed from any serious relationship with "good." We have built a terrible design culture filled with software fetishes, corner-cutting, and worship at the almighty altar of scalability. Where we once fought in the trenches of "Good Design is Good Business," we now seem to operate as an industry of speed freaks and algorithm junkies.
Of course, I am painting with a broad brush. There are still small pockets where quality matters, where people fight to take the time to get things right. But I would argue those places are now the exception, and that most designers coming out of school will never encounter that world professionally, much less be shaped by it.
The systems surrounding design no longer reward depth as they once did. They reward speed, visibility, volume, convenience, and the appearance of momentum. When those become the dominant values, "good" does not merely get neglected. It becomes inefficient. It becomes inconvenient. Eventually, it starts to look almost irrational.
So what happened?
How did an industry that once treated craft, judgment, and rigor as non-negotiable arrive at a moment when "good enough" feels almost extravagant?
Part of the answer is technological. Part of it is economic. Part of it is cultural. But most of it comes down to this: the systems surrounding design no longer reward depth as they once did. They reward speed, visibility, volume, convenience, and the appearance of momentum. When those become the dominant values, "good" does not merely get neglected. It becomes inefficient. It becomes inconvenient. Eventually, it starts to look almost irrational.
That shift shows up everywhere.
First, we live in an algorithmic marketplace. In that world, quality is no longer the only path to attention. Attention can be bought, forced, gamed, and amplified. Good work still matters, but it no longer guarantees discovery, and mediocre work no longer guarantees obscurity. If reach can be purchased, design is judged less by its integrity and more by how well it performs within systems built to reward interruption.
Second, we have confused short-term celebration with long-term value. Many clients, especially newer business owners, are taught online to prize visible momentum over durable foundations. The polished launch, the viral post, the sleek mockup, and the public-facing confidence of "building in public" all play better online than the slow, unglamorous work of building an actual business. Strategy, consistency, positioning, operations, patience, and restraint rarely photograph well. So design is increasingly being pulled into helping businesses perform legitimacy rather than earn it.
At the same time, design itself has become ambient. Everyone now participates in visual communication every day. With a phone in hand, people constantly make aesthetic decisions: framing images, selecting type, editing video, building slides, posting, choosing colors, and composing feeds. In one sense, that is worth celebrating. Visual literacy is more widespread than ever. But there is a cost. When everyone constantly produces design-adjacent output, visual communication starts to feel ordinary, disposable, and interchangeable. The sheer volume of low-level content flattens the distinction between deliberate design and casual production.
Cheap, accessible tools accelerate that flattening. Software has made it possible for almost anyone to execute an idea quickly, with very little training and friction. That democratization is real and, in many ways, useful. But access to tools is not the same as access to judgment. The problem is not that more people can make things. The problem is that the ease of making has convinced many people that process, expertise, and critical standards are optional. When software can generate something passable in seconds, the temptation is to mistake output for understanding.
This has changed the role of the designer. Increasingly, young designers are trained less as makers with taste, discipline, and authorship and more as coordinators of software. Their value is framed not by what they know how to see, decide, or make, but by how efficiently they can find the right platform, automation, template, or tool. They become facilitators of production rather than leaders of creative thought. Faster, yes. More scalable, maybe. But often thinner, safer, and less human.
The internet amplifies all of this. It conditions clients and creators alike to expect speed, novelty, and endless adaptation. Why invest deeply in something bespoke when everything is destined to be cropped, resized, scrolled past, and replaced? Why spend time getting something right when its primary life will be a few seconds on a feed? Under those conditions, permanence disappears, and with it goes one of the old arguments for taking one's time. Much of contemporary design is no longer built to last. It is built to circulate.
And because it is built to circulate, business and design have both become increasingly performative. We live in a culture of constant signaling, where it has never been easier to look like a creative, a founder, a thinker, or a brand. Entire economies now run on borrowed authority and manufactured relevance. The result is not simply more noise but more confusion. More content to sort through. More empty confidence. More difficulty identifying the people who actually know what they are doing.
This is the environment young designers are entering: one that often values visibility over mastery, tools over judgment, and momentum over meaning. In that environment, "good" dies in a very specific way. Not because people openly reject quality, but because the conditions around them make quality harder to defend, harder to sell, and easier to replace with something faster.
That is the real problem. Not that standards disappeared overnight, but that an entire ecosystem formed around making standards feel unnecessary.
In conclusion
So when people ask what is going on in the graphic design industry, I think the answer is this: we are living through the consequences of a world that still wants the appearance of design but has lost much of its patience for the discipline that makes design good.
Good is dead, not because quality no longer exists or serious designers are gone, but because too much of the world around us is built to reward everything except depth, care, and judgment.
And that is exactly why our industry standards matter more now than ever.