Agreed fully. The article was a good read, but it felt a lot like watching someone read a thesaurus to seem more educated in design principles, Eli of course is very well educated in this area. However pseudo-intellectual is a great word for it.

I love reading design critiques to learn new opinions or ideas about design. But I have never learned something from one of his articles (though I admit I don't read them regularly).

Maybe I am not part of his target audience... but presenting a problem, and then a solution to that problem is how people learn. But posting a 3 part essay on how shite something is doesn't help anyone.

But thats just my opinion.

Personally, I learned a lot more about Eli's position from this interview than from most of his articles and I have to say I sympathize with the foundation of his arguments: modernism (and under that umbrella, modernist design) has it's own history, biases and weakness, and those that claim that it does not, that it is a universal solution, are misleading themselves. The issue for me arises in the way he defends his position in his articles, which I would not call critiques in the academic sense of the word, but rather combative attacks. Looking at some of his listed influences in the interview, I'm not really surprised by this, given that guys like Christopher Hitchens et al. are not really known to promote things like dialogue or amicable debate.

While I found the overall interview really insightful, this was a super lame way to end it. People grow from insightful, constructive criticism, and not from attacks. "Honesty" does not make an attack any better.

To be honest though, this isn't just a design industry problem. Society as a whole seems to have developed an unhealthy jumpiness to any form of strongly opinionated criticism.

Parents are frowned on if they say "no" to their toddlers too often and get accused of heavy-handedness. University students are mollycoddled and given 'safe-spaces' to run to when confronted with ideas that oppose their own and therefore offend them. And as adults we tend to accuse each other of intolerance or bigotry at the first hint of someone veering away from the status quo. As long as we have such thin skins, strongly-worded opinions like Eli's will always be unpalatable.

We need to get comfortable with questioning the status quo again, even if it makes us uncomfortable, because it's by questioning that we grow.

For me the worst feedback people can provide to my works is "it looks awesome!" Because there's no action after that

i'm all for direct and honest critique, but he's confusing honesty with hyperbole. i mean, the guy did a 3-part series entitled "Instagram's Abomination." you can be forceful without being offensive; i don't think he gets that.

Fully agreed. When I read a design critique (on someone else's work) I want to learn something about design in general. It helps me see what I have done wrong in the past.

But with (most of) Eli's articles I don't come away learning anything, I come away feeling like I need to produce skeuomorphic designs to please Eli.

I disagree with Eli that criticism needs to be harsh. You don't need to sandwich compliments or beat around the bush either. But hyperbolic rants about how horrible something is, without explaining a solution, doesn't help anyone.

I think you've nailed it right here. I'm disappointed because until now I really had the sense there was more there there. The parts you quote were perfect opportunities for Schiff to say "I'm not being negative for no reason; I honestly believe there are better choices for designers to make, and I want to be direct about the reasons why these trends are making things worse." But instead they came off as braggadocio, and the peculiar idea that no one else is bold enough to say a design sucks -- which, as he points out, armchair critics do all the time. I don't think it builds his credibility to compare what he does to the chatter of random people leaving a movie.

I really appreciated the interview, though. It puts Schiff's writing in clearer perspective for me, even if it might not be the perspective he'd hoped to communicate.

Thanks for the interview, Khoi. After I read it, I read the post you linked in the intro (https://www.subtraction.com/2016/06/24/questions-to-ask-yourself-when-reading-about-design/) and loved it. I'd urgently recommend it to anyone who cares about the topics we're discussing here.

I disagree! Show me where has he made his critiques personal rather than about the work itself! Show me name calling or personal insults in his articles.

I believe its ok to critique the design process that created something alongside a design, but the kind of behavior you're describing I have not seen in his writing at all.

bingo. much of his writing is riddled with cheap attempts to lash out randomly at prominent designers, assumably to gain the notoriety that he now has.

a great example is his attack on Cap Watkins where Eli chose to quote individual words from Cap's post "The Boring Designer" to strip all context and utterly misrepresent cap's writing:

This move towards the design engineer has excited designers like Cap Watkins and 3000 of his supporters who advocate for an ideal "lazy" and "boring" designer who never experiments and "Chooses obvious over clever every time." A perfect designer who compromises their vision to fit what is easiest to produce, not what is best to produce. Most of all, as a manager, Watkins reveres supplicatory designers who "rarely stand their ground."

this isn't critique, it's vitriol. and it has no place here.

Do you sincerely believe Eli's arguments stoop to the level of Donald Trump's?

Unlike Mr. Trump, Eli makes coherent arguments, does not attack people for irrelevant qualities such as their physical appearance, usually explains the “why” (in this case, why he believes a design is poor), and is a decent human being.