A cafe near where I live has started selling fish finger croissants. Something about that combination shortcircuits my brain, leaving me slack-jawed and twitchy, greedy and confused. Objectively, both of these things on their own are great. Croissants suffused my suburban Midlands upbringing with a Parisian elan, a gateway drug to Camus novels and a best-forgotten beret phase. Fish fingers sit in the sweet spot of a perfect Venn diagram – nostalgic comfort food and lazy parent lunch plan. But smashing them together feels sacrilegious – a baffling creative over-reach, like remixing a Vivaldi symphony with Khia’s My Neck, My Back. All of which is to say, I find Design LinkedIn similarly fascinating. Both design and LinkedIn, on their own, are brilliant. I’ve written before about my deep-seated, and inescapable, love of designers. I am also a big fan of LinkedIn. I know why people hate it, but I find it genuinely vibrant – a churning cavalcade of ideas, people, and work that I find interesting and engaging. But together? Can Design LinkedIn fill the void left by Design Twitter? People still reminisce about those glory days and wonder where the same connection, conversation and energy can be found today. Design LinkedIn is certainly gaining traction. And as it continues to grow and develop, we’re seeing some specific archetypes emerge. So whether you’re ready to take your first tentative steps into LinkedIn, or you’re already well-acquainted with the game, it’s useful to be aware (wary?) of some of the stranger players. The Grim Reaper Grids are dead. Kerning is dead. Fonts are dead. Adobe is dead. Agencies are dead. Eyeballs are dead. The concept of death is dead. This guy (and yep, always a guy) roams LinkedIn looking to pronounce death as far and as wide as possible. He has no room for nuance, no interest in discussion. The old world is gone, and you’re an idiot if you’re still trying to cling onto it. Whatever shiny new thing is the future – from AI, to blockchain to those weird pictures of monkeys that somehow became currency (check this before publishing). The strange thing is not that these morbid weirdos exist. It’s that they seem to be incredibly popular. You’re wrong This one’s sort of a second cousin to the guy above, trafficking as they do in provocative condescension. The playbook is simple – they start with a recent piece of design work that’s been garnering a lot of attention. “Lots of people have been sharing XYZ Studio’s work for Reebok.” Here it comes… “But everyone is massively missing what makes it so good.” Here they will either: 1. Share something that absolutely hasn’t been missed, and will have been praised in multiple articles/social posts, which they would know if they did even four minutes of superficial research. or 2. Pick out something so insanely marginal/convoluted that you will need to read it five or six times to make sure what you’re reading is as ludicrous as it first appeared. I heart Figma Lots of people like Figma. But this guy is all-in. He likes every post from the official Figma account. He posts giddy selfies from Config. Adds comments on every uttering from Figma’s senior leaders and reposts their updates with cheerleading comments like, “This team. Soo proud of everyone who made this happen.” One day, out of idle curiosity, you go to see what his role is at Figma. And everything slows down. The call is coming from inside the house. They don’t work at Figma. Never have. The world turned upside down. The Grudger Meet the designer’s designer. A deep thinker and a master craftsperson, they quietly built an impressive client list and a portfolio of brilliant work. But now the game has changed, and they’ve been told they need a personal brand to stave off professional extinction. Under duress, they learned to Instagram. And though they’d never admit it, they came to enjoy that platform, where images reign supreme and every post attracted a waterfall of admiring comments. They had to surreptitiously Google what it meant when young designers called them the GOAT, but they glowed when they found out. Now they’ve been railroaded onto LinkedIn and every post drips with a sense that this is a step too far. They don’t understand the game, and even if they did, they don’t want to play it. The easiest way to spot these people is that their posts start with the phrase, “I’ve been told I need to post more on here…” But there are other telltale signs. Incredibly short captions. An aversion to using paragraphs. And, most clearly, a boom and bust approach to the platform, characterised by manic bursts of 17 posts in three days, followed by four months of silence. Question time There is a tonne of advice out there about how to game the LinkedIn algorithm. While some of it is clearly out of date by the time it’s published – and/or insane – some of it seems to be fairly helpful. Unfortunately it shapes how many people post on the platform, most notably with the rise of broetry. Short staccarto sentences. Where everything seems to be meaningful. Weighty. Game-changing. Even when it’s clearly. Not. Somewhere along the line, these how-to guides went hard on recommending that people ask questions in their posts. And my goodness did people take that to heart. Now whole posts are constructed in this way? Even if it makes no sense? Do you like this logo? Does this strategy resonate with you? What is love (baby don’t hurt me)? It makes everyone sound Australian? Which might be a bit annoying? Or maybe it’s just me? The AI commenter Simply, and objectively, the worst. Recent Jobs