DESIGN'S LEGIBILITY GAP

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Design's struggle for legitimacy stems from "legibility," where organizations only value predictable, determinate work they can measure and plan around. Unlike engineering or marketing, UX/Design remained a synthetic, indeterminate practice, making its core work—research, iteration, and conceptual modeling—invisible to organizations. Design leadership's real challenge, then, is not translating design to the business, but expanding what businesses recognize as legitimate, valuable work.