Unfollow designers

Why real growth comes from filtering noise, understanding business, and focusing on impact.

Originally featured on UX Collective Bootcamp on Medium. View the original article.

Wandering Through the Noise. Made with Dall•E 3.0 by Chris Vargas.

The One Piece of Advice I’d Give Young Designers at the Start of 2026.

Unfollow.

That’s it. That’s the advice.

It sounds simple, almost dismissive, but it is the most intentional career move I wish I had made earlier. Not unfollow people you disagree with. Not unfollow people who challenge you. Unfollow the noise.

At the end of 2025, I overheard a group of young professionals talking during lunch. They were passionate, sharp, and clearly ambitious. You could hear the hunger in their voices, the desire to grow, to do meaningful work, to be taken seriously. But as I listened, something felt familiar.

The conversation kept circling around tools, trends, and opinions they had picked up online. Which tools mattered most. Which redesign was right. Which pattern was correct. None of it was wrong. In fact, it sounded exactly like conversations I had many years ago.

That moment stayed with me.

It made me think about the kind of advice I wish I had followed earlier in my design career. Not advice about tools or frameworks, but about what to pay attention to and just as importantly what to ignore.

If your feed is full of ketchup bottles comparing UI vs UX, run.

If someone talks more about tools than users, run.

If design tokens matter more in the conversation than efficiency, growth, or customer value, run faster.

This is not an attack on design discourse. It is a warning about what shapes your thinking over time.

Over the last few years, platforms like LinkedIn have become saturated with design content optimized for engagement rather than impact. Endless debates about UX versus UI. Button comparisons. Redesigns of famous apps dissected without any understanding of constraints, trade-offs, or accountability.

The industry did not get louder because design became more important. It got louder because it became easier to talk about design than to be responsible for outcomes.

Most truly good designers do not post every day. They are busy solving real problems. They sit in uncomfortable meetings, navigate ambiguity, negotiate trade-offs, and make decisions with incomplete information. Their work rarely fits into a carousel and often will not be celebrated publicly at all.

Good design is not about winning aesthetic debates. It is not about staying on top of every new tool or feature. Good design is good business. And the moment you internalize that, your career trajectory changes.

When design is disconnected from business, it becomes decoration.

When it is disconnected from outcomes, it becomes opinion.

When it is disconnected from accountability, it becomes noise.

I have seen incredibly talented designers stall not because they lacked skill, but because they optimized for the wrong conversations. They could speak fluently about systems, components, and patterns, yet struggled to explain how their work reduced friction, improved retention, increased efficiency, or moved a metric that mattered.

Don Norman once said there are not enough C level design roles and that designers themselves share part of the responsibility. That idea is uncomfortable, but important. As a discipline, we spent years protecting the craft and rightly so. But in doing that, many of us failed to evolve toward speaking the language of decisions, trade-offs, and results.

Design is not here to be admired. It is here to work.

And work, in real organizations, means constraints. It means understanding why something cannot be done right now. It means knowing when speed matters more than elegance and when clarity matters more than perfection.

If you want to grow in 2026, stop following “influencers” who argue about redesigns and start learning from people who understand how products survive, how businesses make decisions, and how impact is actually measured. And many of those lessons, my friend, do not come from designers.

Some of the most valuable insights I have learned came from product managers explaining why timing mattered more than precision. From engineers walking through constraints that completely reshaped a solution. From finance partners questioning assumptions, I had not noticed. From operations teams highlighting inefficiencies no design audit would ever surface.

That does not make design less important. It makes it more powerful.

Understanding business is not selling out. It is how design earns influence. It is how design moves from being invited into meetings to being trusted in decisions. It is how you stop defending your work and start shaping direction.

If you want a real seat at the table, stop debating pixels and start understanding the system they live in. Learn how success is measured. Learn what happens after launch. Learn what breaks at scale.

Curate your inputs as carefully as you curate your work. Your feed is shaping your ambition, your vocabulary, and your definition of success whether you realize it or not.

Design does not need more noise.

It needs more accountability.

And sometimes, the most impactful thing you can do for your career is simply to unfollow.

Stillness Creates Direction. Made with Dall•E by Chris Vargas

References

1. Don Norman: Why being wrong made me successful  —  Future London Academy, 2025

2. Good Design is Good Business  —  John Maeda, Interview by McKinsey Insights, 2015