If designers weren’t designing…

1. People would die.

• Ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars would look like regular old vehicles, just in a bigger hurry.
• Safety diagrams and warning signs would not exist, leading to thousands of needless beverage spills and accidental electrocutions.
• Interfaces like car dashboards would take hours of concentration to decipher, with no designers to bring simplicity and order to the layout.

2. Information would suffer.

• Your ability to read books, magazines and newspapers would be gone, as you try to focus your eyes on body text that isn’t properly typeset or laid out, lacks any kind of meaningful explanatory diagrams or photographs, and has no discernable structure throughout the publication.
• The Internet would be stuck in 1993, with nothing but text-based browsers to help you check email and read websites.
• You’d never be able to catch the right bus, because all the bus schedules would be gone and there’d be no route numbers on the busses themselves.

3. Decision-making would slow down.

• When choosing something like a bank or a university, you’d have to rely on your own notes, because you wouldn’t have any brochures or pamphlets to take home with you.
• When shopping, aisle signage would be absent, and product labels would be cluttered and inconsistent (okay, so that’s not much of a change).
• When ordering food, menus would be positively disorganized, with photos, prices and descriptions in no reasonable order. You might not even know what restaurant you were in.

4. Life would be uglier.

• Your favourite music artist would have no album covers. If you’re lucky, they might put a helpful handwritten scotch-tape label on the front. (Same with movies – no posters and no snappy movie logo).
• Artwork like event posters, wall murals, building signage and public art would be missing, and in its place would be a lonely, heartbreaking void.
• Countries would have no flags, companies would have no logos and Olympic athletes would have blank uniforms, leading to massive confusion, a worldwide drop in morale and patriotism, and a very colourless, unimaginative planet.

What did we miss? What else would happen if designers weren’t designing? Tell us in the comments below!