Regardless, what is made abundantly clear on Pixelapse's website is that drawing coherent illustrations was not a business need for their company. This must be true more broadly, because Dropbox themselves acquired Pixelapse even though they could not competently draw a box.

Another reason that many disparage visual design is that there is real incentive to distancing oneself from it. Many rightly realize that the quickest way to guarantee not getting respect is if their job title includes the word "creative." Thus there is a compensatory advantage to marginalizing visual design and thus proving one's dedication to doing the 'real work.' Daniel Burka of Google Ventures found "Even among designers of similar seniority, there is marked difference in compensation for UX Design, UI Design, and Visual Design," with salaries tending to descend in that order.

Paul Rand once claimed "A bad design is irrelevant, superficial…basically like all the stuff you see out there today." In the years since, he has not been alone in promoting this sentiment. In the introduction to Humanist Interface, I note that designers at prominent companies like Apple, Amazon, and Facebook argue that design used to be a trivial coat of paint.

Since that writing, Facebook's Director of Product Design, Maria Guidice chided designers who "like to make things pretty, a term I like to refer to as 'aesthetic masturbation.'" Today we are told we can rest assured that visual design is no longer so vacuous and superficial, due to the advent of flat design.

I take a different stance. 'Pure veneer' is not an insult in my book. Quite the opposite, it is the very definition of visual design. Thinking visual design is anything but superficial not only requires a profound level of ignorance, but it indicates an incredibly limited view of what visual communication can accomplish.

These rationalizations by newly turned modern minimalists are incredibly telling. If prominent practitioners are being honest with us in claiming that visual design was plagued by harmful decoration only up until the advent of flat design, then they are admitting that for years, for the history of the GUI, and perhaps even the entire history of design itself, designers have been putting on a sham project in order to dupe corporations.

Worse still, claims of visual design's insignificance tell us that design leaders never took their craft seriously. It truly undermines their credibility that it took the arrival of flat design for them to treat the entire spectrum of roles in product design with respect. Of course, as soon as that happened, they graduated from respecting traditional interface design principles.

This so-called 'maturation' in the vast majority of the design industry is in this way a major indictment of the professional history of these practitioners. If anyone should be condemned, it should not be those accused of the crime of visual design, but those practitioners who treat their job as frivolous.

Perhaps the design world breeds a form of narcissism due to its nature as a winner-take-all economy. That would explain the logic of this race to the bottom in which designers feel compelled to attack their craft before others assume they are 'bullshitters' too. In the words of Dr. Sam Vaknin:

By pre-empting society’s punitive measures and by self-flagellating, the narcissist is actually saying: 'If I am to suffer unjustly, it will be only by my own hand and no one else's.'

It is this masochistic status-striving that I find so ugly in this industry. That he who discredits his own craft is the most pious. That the most respected designer is the one who disowns beauty. This perpetual need to be the first to assign irrelevancy to one's own professional practice is the true impetus behind much of the puritanism of modern minimalist avant gardism.