Dear Designer,
I have had a hard time putting into words what I’m thinking and feeling about the fragile state of graphic design these days. I am seeing definitive, dramatic and dire signals flashing.
Young designers I am speaking with are having an increasingly hard time finding entry level position. Older designers I know are either cutting back their time or looking for alternative avenues for their careers. Large so-called creative platforms (Adobe) are increasingly focusing their marketing efforts on non-professional communicators who can build something in minutes instead of days.
Meanwhile, AI tools now have the capacity create a website in minutes.
As an experiment, I took Claude Code for a spin recently. The new Opus 4.5 has become one of the key indicators of overall AI progress for designers, coders, and programmers — and I needed to know for myself what was and wasn’t possible.
In less than one hour, I built a static browser-based app for myself that was every bit as good as other programs that were built over months and years by multiple designers and programmers. It’s not important right now to reveal what the app is or does — the fact is that that I, a person with old school coding skills and 25 years of interface experience, could build something helpful (to me) with an excellent user experience and a relatively sophisticated typographic presentation.
Even more powerfully, I asked Claude to create a roadmap for this tool — and it created 10 steps for me to take with an estimated timeline for completion that was in hours.
This is just the beginning of AI becoming a revolutionary force for building digital tools, applications, websites and interfaces.
AI is doing the same thing for thousands of others in Figma, in Canva, in Replit, in Framer. Yes, most of what I have seen from tools is rudimentary and unoriginal. They suffer from a lack of craft and consideration — but they work. They work.
We need to truly wrap our heads around how technological inevitability in design ideation and production is going to impact what we, dear designer, contend with every day. In the midst of great uncertainty, there can also be tremendous clarity: mostly, it is the acknowledgment that change at this pace is certain.
So, I submit to you three scenarios, each of which both confound and concern me, that contest the field of graphic design and its future practice. I stand by my assessment back in March 2025 that the design profession will divide roughly into small and large practices over the next 3 to 5 years.
But I am presenting these three future scenarios because I also think it’s important to map out longer term projections with which, despite being fraught or familiar, we can map our responses. Each of these are may be seen as mutually reinforcing and there is likely some overlap among them. But I’m also doing my best to draw bright lines between them so as to imagine the scope of these systemic changes in their impact on the design profession.
Scenario 1: The Fully Realized Development of Democratic Design
Since the birth of commoditized design platforms like Squarespace in 2004, it has become both faster and easier to craft digital products that meet the demands of commerce. (Macromedia Dreamweaver, launched in 1997, was its predecessor.)
In so many ways, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix and Webflow have been a boon to designers everywhere, who could become “partners”, specializing in those platforms’ proprietary solutions and creating relatively custom solutions for a range of client types.
With graphic design needs increasing exponentially, and with business demanding measurable and realistic results from their digital investments, more and more agencies, studios, and freelancers have tied their sails to these platforms. Like any relatively inexpensive but useful product (coffee), as audience demand grows, commodity markets rise to meet demand.
But coinciding with this scenario is a democratization of design, a ubiquity that currently lunges toward totality. As AI penetrates and then permeates every single design platform, we will witness the growth of a much more democratic system of design delivery in the next 5 years. Trained or otherwise professional graphic designers will assist other designers in using these tools, acting as directors and managers who oversee what we deem a humanistic profession. Organizations will rely on internal team members who are interested in design to create strategic and necessary products, campaigns, and resources.
In others words, design will be much the same as today but with far more democratic / popular impulses.
Design itself will not go away in this scenario. But it will be reshaped as a delivery vehicle, a tool of commerce and production that everyone uses (and, yes, abuses). The designer still standing in the midst of this flattened scenario is a talented F1 driver. They will thrive on the thrill of the fast and the furious and will need to become ever more excited about the excitement.
Here, the designer becomes an engineer, focused on efficiencies, helping to create new modes of presenting visual ideas while doing their best to humanize experiences. The Constructivist trope in which art is fully in the service of industry becomes ever more realized but, of course without political or revolutionary impulses. Design is democratized but also fully neutered.
Scenario 2: The Death of Design
A further extrapolation presents a more dire one. Let’s get this one over with. Graphic design, along with most other fields of design endeavour (architecture, service and editorial) no longer exists.
It goes away.
Everything goes away, eventually. We believe we are a permanent fixture in the universe because of our very status as existing beings. But we all know nothing lasts, including ourselves, our loved ones, and the very profession to which we most identify.
Until around 1910, horse and buggy drivers made a decent living and prided themselves on their ability to navigate dirty streets. There are probably a few dozen of those people in existence today.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the maker Claude, recently wrote that “AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next 1–5 years, even as it accelerates economic growth and scientific progress.” I put a huge discount on Amodei and other Silicon Valleys bros who have learned to use their dire predictions as PR talking points. However, if we put some credence into his predictions, we should also take into consideration the ramifications of the half-life of this event. If what Amodei says is true, Imagine that every few years, entry-level jobs are halved and then halved again. In one decade, we have slices of knowledge work so thin that we can hardly see them.
This is the end of design as we know it.
We would join a long list of other highly esteemed and highly educated workers, including radiologists, programmers, writers and thinkers of all stripes. Schools of higher education would likely go away entirely. Young people would study the liberal arts at their own financial peril. Music would be made by marketers. Movies would be made my machines. Electricians, plumbers and other technicians would diligently follow the plans of the artificially intelligent. Blue collar workers would be paid extraordinarily well while white collar ones will not.
Universal basic income would kick in.
We would have so much time on our hands that the notion of work would change fundamentally — and beyond what we can humanly imagine right now.
Scenario 3: Design as Defiant Project
There are those who think that an AI bubble will pop. AI is only as good as the energy we have to fuel its growth. Circular investments among AI companies are creating market jitters. Chip production and large server farms will become increasingly difficult to manage. AI subscriptions are not keeping pace with expenses.
There is nothing inevitable about technological change and prognostications are just that — educated guesses built on pundits’ childhood traumas, historical misreadings, and too many tea leaves.
There is a third scenario which is more sunny.
In this plot, independent designers are fewer and farther between. AI wreaks initial havoc but not as much as we might have thought. And indie designers, as well as many studios and agencies, thrive.
Yes, it is hard to start, run, and manage a small business, whether in Canada, Europe or the United States. Add to that the dysfunction of regulatory regimes (tariffs and taxes), the rise of inputs costs (food and housing), and the destabilizing nature of project-based work (one offs), and the realities of sustaining an independent graphic design business become ever more real.
As well, design students are not taught how to run a small business or how to create new values within tired and tried markets; in so many ways, students are left to flounder, thrown to the turbulent tides to make their way.
But in this scenario, there is also an opportunity for the far-thinking, unconventional, and hardworking designer — the individual who considers the noise of technological progress as just that — noise. Sitting in the midst of discontinuity and confusion around the changing state of design, this design professional takes no prisoners. They fundamentally focus on what moves them — personal values, a given technological outlook, an idealistic commitment to their illustration, a typographic outlook, or some other curious speciality that demonstrates commitment to craft.
Here, the massive winds of change whip up against those windows of the designer’s studio. And yet, tucked within, they safely build an independent aesthetic and technical practice. Their work may acknowledge and grapple with the rise of artificial intelligence and the market economy but their mission is steadfast, dedicated to a vision of success for themselves, their art, and their clientele.
Clearly, this is the scenario that I most wish for, and even long for. It is design as a continued expression of artistic production, typographic craft, and visual invention. It hearkens back to the 3,000 year history of individual aesthetic commitment — the artist (or small group of artists) and their studio from which the modern design profession partly emerges.
There may be fewer designers there. But the work that will come to them will be meaningful for themselves and momentous to those who engage with them. They will thrive as artists of the everyday, despite or because of it all.
Wishing you a good week ahead.
Quote of the Week
“The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself.”
— Seth Godin (TypeQuote)
P.S. If you have the means, and interest, consider supporting this endeavour with a paid subscription. It would mean so much to me. (I am planning on moving to Ghost soon and subscriptions will carry over there when I do.)