The biggest thing for me is when someone's ego or title dictates design decisions without any reasoning or data. Having someone, particularly outside the team, swoop in and force their opinion while ignoring the rationale born from a solid design process is a total morale killer. It breeds the thought, "Why am I even bothering with the process when it's going to get ignored?"

Not giving the designer ownership of the project. If they don't feel responsible for the success of the project, they will likely put minimal effort into it.

Marketing people and clients...

Get a little apathetic when people say "CompanyX does it like this..." almost hinting we should mimic their design. I'm all for leveraging cool stuff, but that sentiment can make design feel cheap.

Reading the other comments here, and based on my own experience, it seems like it all falls back to someone having an ego. Maybe its you and you start thinking a coworker's work is subpar. Maybe somebody else thinks their work is better than yours.

Maybe you have the most experience, and you feel like you are the best designer on the team. And you start to feel like the rest of the team is holding you back, and you get a little cynical, stop trying so hard, and your coworkers think you are kind of a dick.

In that old saying "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room", maybe 'the wrong room' is a metaphor for having the wrong mindset. Maybe the quote is actually about keeping your own ego in check, keeping an open mind and realizing that there is always something to be learned from your peers. That every single person you ever meet can teach you something.

If you take the more literal version of that quote, and you're constantly rank-sorting yourself vs others, thinking "who are all these idiots?", then you'll get pretty jaded pretty quick.

Dribbble.

Hey all. This is Chris (the other host on the show).

The comments here are really interesting. Thanks to everyone so far!

(That is all...)

Not being open to other styles, fields of work, technology, cultural trends etc.

Everything can be inspiration/ visual ammo a designer can keep in their back pocket to call upon when solving a specific problem for a client. I think a designer looses their edge when they box themselves into a stylistic corner then starts complaining.

I think it's blue-ribbon kids who've never had a tough time. By tough time I do not mean a single parent raising 123 kids, but just generally facing adversity. Whether in work or in life or in sports. The premise that you are not the whole person on the team, or the cog in the machine or whatever. The general premise that one person contributes to a larger piece and things are often a cumulative effort derived of a bunch of individual efforts.

I think folks who do not understand that are jaded. And in this case, jaded designers.

I worked closely with the design team at my old job as a Front End Developer and the Design team lead was particularly jaded, cynical and downright lazy with the designs we would get back from him.

I would suspect that there's a ton of reasons that make a designer jaded, but from my experience, I would say it usually boils down to the employer/client. With this company in particular, it was a website mill, churning out sites as fast as they could sell them. The owner had a particular phrase he'd tell the designers which was to "McDonaldize" the sites. So not only did the designers have to listen to the store owners terrible design suggestions for hours between calls and emails, but they also weren't given any real chance to create because it was forced down their throats that they need to stamp these things out as fast as they possibly can. With such a creative stifling environment, I can imagine why they just stopped giving a crap.

For me it's lack of a challenge, when that sets in I tend to look to move on to a new agency, I always think if I'm not being challenged then I'm not going to improve, so will go looking for that challenge elsewhere.

Awkward clients that don't less to evidence or reason can be another one...

I take issue with equating "sloppy work that leaves out details" with bad design, especially in an agile environment. Expecting somebody to have all the answers, all the time, is precisely the kind of attitude that encourages egotistical decision makers to rise to the top.

Going from office to office and seeing how everyone hates/talks shit about their clients. The grass is greener illusion was shattered for me real fast (6-8 months of contracting for different companies).

edit: To clarify, toxic work environments can make me feel jaded at times.

Are you saying that leaving out details is a sign of someone losing their edge?