What’s next for tech (and specifically, design)?

  • From a design perspective, in the current era, the web has now returned to standardisation (millenial/flat illustration, dark mode, Tailwind/Chakra, Material Design, DesignOps/design systems, component-driven design, semantic web) which means UI design is increasingly homogeneous.
    • Brand now is expressed primarily through illustration and copy rather than at the UI element level.
    • Semantic markup and accessibility are increasingly important, but still rarely achieved.
  • Over the course of EOBE (2010-2020) alongside the startup world, many large organisations (both private and public) were attempting to “transform”. Their prior incarnations may have been naive (see: webmaster) or simply unable to cope at their current scale.
    • Digital transformation
    • Agile transformation
    • Migrate to CMS!
    • Design systems
    • Restructures
    • New, tech-focused leadership
  • Large non-tech organisations (public, private) and large tech organisations now employ the majority of the dev and design industry, and are no longer “hard” to work at at an individual contributor level.
    • They also employ a huge class of middle managers who may or may not be technical
    • Management styles have largely coalesced on Agile/Scrum (or sAFE)