But design work is so much healthier/better when you stop telling yourself that you’re changing lives. Websites can just be…websites! And your front end framework or side project doesn’t need to reshape human civilization for it to be worth while. Once you relieve yourself of that pressure it’s so much easier to be happy and to do good, useful work. (I am still struggling with this, leave me alone.)

When it comes to design: forget the database, pretend it isn’t there.

Perhaps our motto as designers should then be this: Do no harm. Make things clear. And show us the future.

That’s a clunky way of saying “when something is different, make it look different.” The best designers, in my opinion, take this to heart and don’t use too many variants to make those differences as clear as possible.