You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
48 comments
·April 24, 2025rglover
jjmarr
The Giving Tree (by Shel Silverstein) came out in the same year my dad was born. But my parents still read it to me.
I still don't understand why I have such a strong reaction to the book. It feels like the message is "take care of your parents instead of just taking from them".
spondylosaurus
There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice... I feel like the "mid-tier creative who's famous on socials" phenomenon is similar, although I couldn't exactly say how.
pixl97
I mean advertising is advertising. You could have the best program in the world but if no one knows about it chances are you're not going to get rich.
Now I'm not much for salespeople in general, but I do understand their purpose.
godelski
Honestly, that seems like a solvable problem. Certainly not easy, certainly tremendously difficult, but I'm not sure it is impossible nor that we can't make strides in that direction. We're fundamentally talking about a search algorithm, with specific criteria.
I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.
tough
This is more true for indie hackers or solo team founders i guess, if you're just a designer in a big corp, you don't usually handle marketing beyond trying to build/design a marketeable product, devrel and other positions are more marketing like
pelagic_sky
As a designer, I know some absolutely amazing artists who just hunker down and produce phenomenal art/designs and I am not fluffing here. As a climber, I also know of climbers who are at the best in the world level, but don’t post sends on IG or muck about in socially promoting themselves. It’s great to know that there are extremely talented people doing their thing and it’s not driven by leaderboards or social clout.
DudeOpotomus
This is well written. It also seems to describe society at large, especially our current society. So many things work so well, they become invisible. After time, people dont even realize how much is working behind the scenes to make everything work well and they assume we dont need those things.
setsewerd
It's the same logic that's behind the declining vaccination rates unfortunately. Things could get pretty bad if that trend doesn't reverse.
abtinf
In fact, becoming known takes an enormous amount of energy dedicated toward that purpose.
mattgreenrocks
Yes. And time is zero sum. So you end up with people who see no issue with sinking lots of time into audience building.
I’d rather do the thing than talk about it. Or, frankly, watch/listen/read others.
famahar
I read an interesting thread about this in relation to game dev. Development is ugly, so a lot of audience building and investor potential comes from creating visually appealing gameplay demos and mechanics. Often they are made separate from the core of the game. All that time spent making engaging content ends up compromising the development process and turning it into more of a show reel, rather than a fully functioning holistic game.
ilrwbwrkhv
[flagged]
stavros
Of course you'd have to pay 700k if you're basically rejecting anyone who's ever been online. The candidate pool is, like, three people.
codr7
I use LinkedIn to find jobs; and to troll the self applauding, back patting influencer crowd for fun.
sorcerer-mar
Uhh... having a LinkedIn takes like 10 minutes spent once. For most industries it's a pretty obvious investment to make yourself reachable by anyone who might be looking for you and to have an added data point of legitimacy (as in simply "is this a real human being emailing me")
Your heuristic is extremely bad.
wanderingmind
One of the reasons I love listening to 99% Invisible podcast[1]. Not just a great designer is unknown, but the hallmark of a great design is that its almost invisible unless you look for it.
jackcosgrove
I don't think it's just about doing vs talking.
There are people who are great at something not because they do novel work, but because they redo known work that's really hard.
Not everyone has the luxury of knowing where the frontier lies and working at it. Many, many people reinvent the wheel simply because they don't know that what they're trying has already been done. And they can redo the work in a great way.
Of course they'll never get credit for this.
bdangubic
works for SWEs too - I've had the pleasure working with a bunch of amazing SWEs in my almost 3 decades in the industry, 9 out of top 10 if I rank them do not have a Github account or blog or post sht on "X" or wherever... Just do amazing sht at work and go home to their families :)
listenallyall
Absolutely. And there are plenty of occupations where even a Michael Jordan level talent would go totally unknown and unappreciated. Accountant. Plumber. Chemist. Many more.
spiritplumber
This was my experience in the "maker movement" in the 2010s. You may know me from OpenRov, RobotsAnywhere/CellBots, and the NAVCOM AI autopilot. But you probably don't.
Who got attention? People who spent 20% of their time making and 80% self-promoting.
econ
It's easy. You just compare your thing to everything similar and keep at it until you are convinced yours is miles ahead. Other opinions are irrelevant.
ChrisMarshallNY
I think that greatness of mind needs to be coupled with ambition, a certain level of arrogance and self-absorbtion, and a personality that doesn't make you a pariah.
I suspect that combinations like that, are, indeed, as rare as hen's teeth.
Many great talents probably couldn't be arsed to play the rat race game, and keep their domain humble, or they piss off other people so much, that they never get a break.
null
handfuloflight
Why does it have to be arrogance and self absorption? Why not simply confidence and vision?
ChrisMarshallNY
It certainly can be (I'm obviously not the expert on the traits), but arrogance (think Steve Jobs) means that there's less self-doubt, and less openness to outside counsel, which is normally a Very Bad Thing, but, if your own counsel [vision?] is very good, then maybe not so bad.
In my time, I've worked with some top-shelf folks, who had many -but not enough- of the combination, to be mildly successful.
Most of the best were extremely ... er ... confident. Some, it came across as rudeness, but others, would politely accept your counsel, and then instantly feed it to the shredder, without you ever knowing.
I preferred the rude ones.
sublinear
> I preferred the rude ones.
Seeking social cues to describe greatness is exactly what the grift preys on.
vjvjvjvjghv
There is a very fine line between all of these. When you look at famous people like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk or Gates they have all these attributes. Another example would be Michael Jordan in basketball or Michael Schumacher in racing.
ilaksh
People just don't know the difference between popularity and merit. Similarly, they don't know the difference between someone who is successful or good at what they do versus one who makes a lot of money.
spamjavalin
Remind me of the statement (I’m paraphrasing) ‘No one gets the credit for solving a problem that never happened’
This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]).
The book "Do the Work" explained it well: "The amateur tweets. The pro works." People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working.
Something fairly consistent I've observed: the popular people you see tweeting and on every podcast are likely not very good at what they're popular for.
Sometimes there's overlap, but it's the exception, not the rule.
[1] https://xtian.design/