AI doesn’t make design better.
I’ve been designing with new tools for my entire life: Creative Suite, then Sketch/Figma, now Claude. The tools have changed, and we can design faster. Design’s core value—understanding people well enough to improve their lives—persists, as does design’s ability to scale organizations’ impact.
You still need an experienced designer to do that; adding AI will only make it faster, not better.
I remember learning Adobe Illustrator in college. My professors—“real” designers who still used film cameras and built layouts with glue and scissors—wouldn’t teach it. They feared the colonization of design practice by non-designers. A teaching assistant caught the oversight and taught us Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign on her own, single-handedly ensuring we had a chance at employment in the first dot-com crash.
Ten years later, Sketch arrived. Then Figma. Each triggered the same industry panic: the tool would democratize design to the point of destroying it. Novices would create artifacts once reserved for experts. The craft would die.
This is an oversimplification. Yes, each new tool brought less experienced designers into the work, but the firms who thrived were the ones that recognized the tool as a tool rather than as a threat or a replacement for thinking.
AI is today’s panic. It does accelerate the artifact-production layer of the process dramatically. For designers who understand what their work is actually for, that acceleration is a gift. Those who think the artifact is the work are condemned to producing workslop at light speed.
The uncomfortable truth is that most of what passes for design today is pattern replication. Reproducing variations on familiar interface patterns, familiar layouts, familiar brand systems. AI is extraordinarily good at that kind of work. If your competitive advantage was being faster at pattern replication than other designers, AI is coming for your job.
If your competitive advantage is understanding humans—their lived experiences, feelings, contexts, worries, hopes, and dreams—AI is a wonderful tool. The question isn’t whether to use it; the question is what you’re actually trying to design, and whether your current practice is centered on the artifact or on the human.
Figure that out first, then think about tools.
