Ok, I’m not your stereotype. 69 soon, beardless (although I did have a beard when I was in my 30s for a while), pretty hairless (aka bald) and would never wear a cap of any type. I am a European (worse: German) white male and I’ve been in design forever. But I had not been to Dribbble before today. I won’t go back there ever again either, because Dribble perpetuates the prejudice about design that I disagree with most: it’s all about pretty pictures.

How can you reduce a project — any project — to just one image? Unless you design posters, record sleeves or postage stamps (and who does these days?), representing a project in a stamp-size image not only reduces any inherent complexity to the space between the like and not-like buttons, but it also reduces our role in the process. If we don’t know what the issue was, the brief, the stated aim, we have no idea whether that pretty picture actually solved the problem.

(By the same token, just because a designer looks like that bearded white male doesn’t mean he is a superficial style merchant.)

Yes, we should make things look better than they did before, but lipsticking pigs is easy; every make-up artist knows. How do we know something is “amazing work” when all we see is a 300×400 img? Is there a place for real discussions about work? Without trolls who always complain about anything they didn’t do themselves? Where tiny, private jobs get the same attention as a new THEMET logo?

Enough dribbble from an old guy.