Bad design always has a good reason: An expression of frustration toward bad design decisions that were taken for political reasons. On the client side the concept is often expressed as: “We know this isn’t good, but we want to avoid discussions with the head of department so-and-so.” The best practice against bad design with a good reason is a solid digital strategy. If we join a client after the Digital Strategy was decided, we usually oppose their laziness and lack of professionalism and try to escalate. That doesn’t always work, but it’s always worth a try.

Barcelona: A forgiving, cosmetic, and Mediterranean way to Design. Barcelona manifests as a Taste-driven focus on visually pleasant forms and colors supplemented by neglected business goals, and a lack of meaning and typographic delicacy. The European answer to California.

Bullshit: Bullshit is an attitude that ignores truth. It does whatever it can to gain an advantage with the lowest possible effort. A bullshitter’s sole concern is profiting from making you believe what serves them well. Bullshitters pretend to know what they don’t know, do what they cannot do, sell what they don’t own, and care about things they don’t care about. Note that bullshitters are not liars. Liars are concerned about the truth because they want to make you believe what they know is not true. What bullshitters say may or may not be true. Quite often bullshit is delivered in such a way that it could be verified or justified at a later point. Bullshit’s disregard for the truth makes it hard to deal with—particularly in young and complex fields like design and tech where few people have enough experience to speak from experience. Since a lot of money can be made in this field through mere pretension and greatness by association, bullshit is abundant in tech because "the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.” (Harry Frankfurt). See also Artificial Intelligence.

Buzzwords: Buzzwords are not categorically Bullshit, but keep in mind that the tech industry reinvents its vocabulary every couple of years to sell something old as something new. This is how internet marketers turned into web 2.0 consultants in 2004 then transformed into social media marketing specialists circa 2010. When talking to design firms, watch for people saying things like: "We apply cognitive science and design thinking to create empathy and authenticity through agile and carefully curated storytelling to provide your company with a flat, engaging, hand-crafted, cloud-based and mobile-first experience design to make your brand ready for the future of Artificial Intelligence in the sharing economy of the Internet of Things.” If you’re exposed to such buzzwords, you risk hiring a company that wants to take advantage of your delayed Digital Transformation. And if you persist, you’ll likely be charged $15,000 per “hand-crafted” or “curated” X post that nobody wants to read to begin with.