Mike Monteiro > Quotes

“Confidence doesn’t come from knowing you’re right—it comes from being okay with failing.”
― Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job

“If you believe you need to do what your boss wants because they’re paying you, you also need to believe the doctor should provide the oxycodone if the addict is willing to pay for it. The exchange of cash for services doesn’t supersede ethics. Following unethical orders won’t keep you out of jail.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“A good designer finds an elegant way to put everything you need on a page. A great designer convinces you half that shit is unnecessary.”
― Mike Monteiro

“Ethics cannot be a side hustle.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Let’s order too much of something just to see where our limits are. Let’s take a chance precisely because it might fail. Let’s take the hard way out. Let’s go to the moon. Fuck it; let’s go to the moon again. Let’s quit our jobs. Let’s work at being better at what we do by fucking up faster, not less. Let’s fuck up really fast. Let’s wrestle sharks, fight monsters, and disagree with the board. Let’s borrow so much money it becomes someone else’s problem. Let’s start a 10-hour drive by announcing “I’m not into you anymore.” Let’s dump everything out of the garage onto the sidewalk and build something really cool in that space. Let’s start out to build a better mousetrap, and halfway there let’s decide to jump on the mice’s team.”
― Mike Monteiro

“It should freak you out that gangsters can agree on a code of behavior but designers can’t. Crime is more organized than design.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Empathy is a pretty word for exclusion. I’ve seen all-male all-white teams taking “empathy workshops” to see how women think. If you want to know how women would use something you’re designing, get a woman on your design team. They’re not extinct. We don’t need to study them. We can hire them!”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“The world isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed to work. And we’re the ones who designed it. Which means we fucked up.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“I intend to show you that design is a political act. What we choose to design and more importantly, what we choose not to design and, even more importantly, who we exclude from the design process—these are all political acts.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“For the record, I have nothing against art. I love art. I’m an artist myself. I’m also a designer. I understand the difference between the two. Design is the solution to a problem, but that problem is never your self-esteem.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“a designer who says they were “inspired” to do something opens the door for a stakeholder to give feedback that’s just as subjective. Whim begets whim. Now you’ve got a roomful of people arguing about their favorite colors.”
― Mike Monteiro, You're My Favorite Client

“I write a bunch of form labels on the whiteboard, in a nonsensical order, along with a bunch of randomly sized input boxes. I include first name, last name, address, gender, city, state, email address, etc. Then I tell the interviewee that we’re designing a form to sign up for an email newsletter and to arrange them in the right order. Only people who ask me why I need the users’ gender, or physical address, or really, anything but their email address get a second interview. I won’t hire a designer who doesn’t ask why, and I won’t hire a designer whose desire to arrange boxes is more important than their desire to protect users’ data.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Make sure you’re consciously building the story you want to be telling. And make sure your story is compelling enough that your next client is excited to become a character in it.”
― Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job

“As long as you are a designer, you have a responsibility to make the world better for the rest of humanity. If you are a designer, you are a human being first. It is your job to stop those that would denigrate humanity for their own selfish benefit.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“[As designers] We need to advocated for the people who aren't in the room, and stand up to those who are. That's the job. We must be engaged in the process of what gets designed way before it enters the phase where traditionally and erroneously thought of as design.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey published the world’s first tweet: “just setting up my twttr.” On July 22, 2018, Donald Trump tweeted: “To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” (Capitalization his.) In the twelve years between those two tweets, some things happened that are worth exploring.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Beware a designer who wants you to like them more than they want to do good work.”
― Mike Monteiro, You're My Favorite Client

“You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for the effects those things have upon the world.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“People don’t see the things they’re rewarded for as problems to fix.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“There’s a big difference between defending work, which a designer must know how to do, and being defensive about work, which a designer should never do.”
― Mike Monteiro, You're My Favorite Client

“We need to challenge the idea that a CEO’s primary mission is to make money for shareholders.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“That’s it: design is the plan that gets us to our goal.”
― Mike Monteiro, You're My Favorite Client

“For years, the libertarian con artists of Silicon Valley have been telling us they want to change the world. But when the people at the top tell you they want to change the world, it’s generally because they’ve figured out how to profit even more from those below them. (To be fair, not even in my wildest dreams did I think even those dirtbags would be okay normalizing fascism to make that happen. Yet here we are.)”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol, and is now so entrenched in the lives of young people that it is no longer possible to ignore it when talking about young people's mental health issues.” Shirley Cramer, chief executive, Royal Society for Public Health”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Jack’s main priority was making sure he couldn’t be accused of having made a decision. His obsession with remaining impartial has made him impotent to act, even on the side of decency. He wants to be able to cast blame on an algorithm, rather than his own actions. That way he wouldn’t have any blood on his hands.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men, once told the New York Times:1 “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Here we get to the point: design disasters usually spring from the faulty notion that design is art not craft.”
― Mike Monteiro, You're My Favorite Client

“In some cases, the companies started out fine, and made the decisions to take ethical shortcuts, usually because of a lethal combination of market forces and unethical staff (including leadership). In Twitter’s case, we can almost pinpoint the exact second this happened: It’s when they measured a Donald Trump tweet that broke their guidelines against the engagement it was getting, decided to leave it, and started defending that decision.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“The vast majority of design programs across the world still live within art schools. Not to shit on art schools—they’re a fine place to learn how to make art; but art has as much in common with design as a lobster has with a carrot cake.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Make them call you by your name. That name is designer.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It