You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown

Invisible design and uncredited work

• Many compare good design to infrastructure: when it works, it disappears, leading people to underestimate what’s required and sometimes dismantle what’s keeping things stable.
• Preventative work is seen as especially invisible: those who avert problems rarely get credit, while “heroes” who fix crises are rewarded.
• Everyday life is full of such hidden designers: road layouts, signage, synth patches, VFX tools, libraries and frameworks, etc., all created by people “you’ve never heard of.”

Doing the work vs self-promotion

• Several argue that becoming known demands enormous effort in audience-building, often at the expense of the craft itself.
• Others counter that if you want to make a living from creative work, you must invest heavily in selling both the work and yourself.
• There’s frustration that people who spend 80% of their time promoting often outshine more skilled but quieter peers.

Talent, ambition, and personality

• One thread discusses “greatness” requiring not just ability but ambition, confidence, and sometimes arrogance; examples from tech founders and elite athletes are raised.
• There’s debate over whether arrogance is actually necessary, or whether strong but calm confidence is enough.

Fame, quality, and luck

• Commenters stress that the correlation between fame and quality is weak. Many greats in art and science were obscure or are still unknown.
• Some emphasize structural bias, historical luck, and gatekeepers in who becomes famous; others question whether pure sexism or randomness fully explains who is remembered.
• A minority view suggests that truly good work almost always finds at least some audience; others strongly disagree, citing many counterexamples.

Examples across domains

• Stories span designers, game devs, musicians, climbers, software engineers, open-source maintainers, artisans, and academics—all doing outstanding work in obscurity.
• University music recitals, local bands, small indie games, and niche tools are offered as places where world-class quality often hides.

Social media, attention, and gatekeeping

• Social media is seen as amplifying mid-tier talent that optimizes for visibility.
• Some lament the loss of editors/curators who filtered for quality; others point out that self-promotion and networking have always been part of success.

Design debate: Cybertruck as case study

• The Cybertruck sparks a side debate: some praise its brutalist, utilitarian aesthetic and future “aging,” others call it ugly or structurally misguided.
• Disagreement centers on whether its form is driven by function/cost (e.g., stainless steel constraints) or by marketing aesthetics that ignore material realities.