The Designer, The Craftsman, & The Programmer

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One of the best books on programming is The Pragmatic Programmer. Its cover features a simple carpenter’s plane on grey background while the book itself is a philosophical and hilarious deep-dive into what it truly means to be a craftsperson and a programmer at the same time.

Before the industrial revolution, every carpenter knew how to carve intricate art pieces into their works. A furniture for the home became a timeless, generational piece. We had a beautiful cupboard passed down through our family since the 1700s, with carvings of birds’ flight, lilypads, and much more.

After the industrial revolution, the craftsperson became the laborer. Someone filling their role in the manufacturing line, producing the part to its exact specification for assembly down the line. Modern minimalism, Bauhaus, and so much more were the results of this new career of “designers” trying to figure out how to combine industrial age priors with human-first design principles.

In my home town of San Francisco, the same thing has happened as the scale of individual products reaches the scale of entire industries. Apple’s AirPods generated as much revenue as all of LEGO, the world’s largest toy company. And in that process, every product needs to be repeatable.

So while Apple had to invent new manufacturing methods to fit the innovative design of the Mac 3, the latest generation of products have Tim Cook’s signature boring minimalist style. The greatest design innovation in the last few years from Apple have been the overhaul of its UI with Liquid Glass, a far cry from Jobs’ and Ive’s original design visions.

This minimalism has made its way into all of our favorite apps. The programmer became an engineer instead of a craftsperson during the 2010s and shifted to simply making sure the applications worked, forgetting The Art of Computer Programming.

I experienced this first-hand, as my previous home page was a hacker-esque terminal interface with a real scan of my brain rotating and reacting to the user. I updated it to an inoffensive blog post website (this one) and made that my home page.

The same happened with Apart Research’s home page as it went from a website any hacker would be excited to head to to a more scalable brand that the UK AISI, EU AI Office, and AGI labs wouldn’t be afraid to work with. I forgot to inspire, despite the fact that it’s all we truly are here for as humans and programmers.

Today, my home page has returned to a designer’s home page, and I try to make sure every application I work on feels inspiring to the visitor and my development teams. This requires me to bring a kind of renaissance mindset to my work since every UI framework and vibe coding priors incentivizes me to go to the least offensive version of the app.

This blog post is my short attempt at cataloguing what it means for the ideas of design and technology to merge and get us back to the world of craftsmanship.

One of the most exciting parts of the 2020s has been the introduction of a retro sci-fi inspiring and epic design language, first truly perfected at scale through Smith and Diction’s re-design of Perplexity and today with the design language of Workshop Labs. Both phenomenal attempts at making technology more human.

Strangely, the best designs in tech used to come from the web3 crowd, however useless the technology actually turned out to be. They had the money and needed the community to buy into their new markets, and it turned into a design fest. Craft flourished where there was freedom to experiment with brand and where inspiration became the purpose.

And of course, at more niché locations on the web, you can still find a large swathe of interesting designs. However, these often sacrifice UX for the design to inspire the visitor. Rippling dashboards are not designed to be inspiring or interesting, simply to work.

Today, as I design, I often wonder who I have in mind as the user. When it’s hackers and founders, I have more freedom to pursue something inspiring, since that’s the background I come from. When it needs to be corporate-ready, I have a natural inclination towards minimalism and a clear UX above all. However, this is not what the renaissance craftsperson would have done.

They would have wanted to create an experience that delights and inspires. One with symbolism and depth in the corners. An extra custom animation on the simplest buttons that make engaging with it a joy. A footer with easter eggs to the most important philosophy of our time.

My homepage is back to something I’m proud of. For every product, I now ask what would make it cool. What is the letter I send to the user with this piece? What is the letter I send to the future?

Like The Pragmatic Programmer calls for in the programmer, let’s call upon designers to remember what it means to be a craftsperson.

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