Ben Pieratt, designer and founder of Svpply:

The market is handing you steak and you’re choosing the gristle. The market is handing you gold bullion and you’re taking the nickel.

As a designer, you enjoy building things for other people’s use. Your value is determined by the degree to which you can empathize with groups of people around a given topic. Historically, this relationship has required a large(r) company to act as mediator for the emotional mass-transaction. Companies provide you with an audience inasmuch as they have customers, and that’s enough for you because you just want to design stuff that solves stuff.

The internet kills all middlemen.

You now have direct access to the raw vein of popular attention. The pixels you’re pushing have a higher exchange rate than you’re giving yourself credit for*. No hounding client payroll, no selling other people’s stuff, no building other people’s wealth, no nephew’s cousins stepping in with the authority to change everything you’ve been working on.

There has never been a greater opportunity for designers, makers and doers.  Well said!