The dictionary (app) defines jargon as “expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.” But of course, we all know that it is much more than that. With the right jargon you can grow brain-compatible competencies, facilitate world-class supply-chains, and—if you’re lucky—even recognize affinity-based core values. Um, yeah. You can also fake your way through any meeting or presentation where you have no idea what you’re talking about, simply by piling on the syllables and hyphens.
We live in a golden age of jargon with websites like dack.com, unsuckit.com, and the Plain English Campaign let you generate and translate jargony BS phrases on just about any topic. Jargon now comes in more flavors than Baskin Robbins ice cream. So naturally the field of design has evolved its own set of meaningless phrases. And now they’re being gathered in one place for your amusement.
The aptly-named designjargonbullshit.com is a Tumblr blog offering nothing but a stream of BS used to promote and describe design work.
And this is not a bunch of phony auto-generated BS. This is the real stuff, used by actual designers and marketers. Each example is linked back to the original source.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some curated touchpoints I need to leverage.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on May 3, 2013
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