Crayons

I was invited this morning to a review of a corporate intranet homepage. The original design is an extremely busy, confusing piece of work that's full of conflicting, nonparallel lists, lacks coherence and hierarchy, and is the sort of page you can puzzle over for long minutes before concluding there's just no way you're going to find what you're looking for. In other words, it badly needs some design work. 

The site is immense, but there were only a couple of mockups. Worse, they seemed to have exactly the same content, just slightly tweaked to make the graphics look boxier and a different shade of blue. I asked about use cases and IA charts, and was told no, that's not part of this "design initiative". The content will not change one bit, nor will its organization. It just might sit in a different color box. 

How is it that this kind of crayon-coloring is called "design", while a serious effort to make a huge repository of information comprehensible, navigable, and useful is called..."design"? Sigh.