Over the last ten years, a surge of digital design tools and apps has made design more open and reachable than ever. Today, anyone can make a website on Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, or Cargo and quickly fill a ready-made template with stock imagery and illustrations. Anyone can produce a logo with Squarespace’s logo generator, then carry it over to presentations, social media assets, and a host of ephemera using Canva.
They can prototype with Figma, Sketch, Invision, Origami, Framer, Principle, and Balsamiq; run brainstorms with Figjam, Miro, and Mural; and share notes in Notion or capture a walkthrough on Loom. Because of this, designers no longer have to pay $52.99 a month for a computer-constipating Creative Cloud subscription, or tiredly move from app to app trying to figure out the proper sequence of keystrokes needed to export a rasterized .png. The future is here.
But all of this raises the question: If everyone can be a designer, what does that mean for design? Anyone who remembers designers’ responses to the Squarespace Logo launch (circa 2014) knows this is a loaded subject. We have arrived at a turning point: As more and more traditional design tasks become automated, the designer’s role has to change. Beyond adding a pile of new software skills to their résumés, the coming era will ask designers to assume new, enlarged roles — ones that stretch far beyond what we have usually placed under the umbrella of design.
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Of course, what it means to be a designer has never been fixed. As technology has progressed, the meaning of design has broadened — from adding a visual finish to shaping product strategy. In turn, that has produced more defined roles and greater segmentation for practitioners. Search any job board and you’ll see openings for creative designers, graphic designers, product designers, brand designers, content designers, experience designers, digital designers, game designers, print designers, and, of course, UI/UX designers.
The optimistic reading is that this growth in specialized design roles shows the industry has matured and its value has become clear. For years, designers asked for a seat at the table, eventually got one, and some even went on to build companies of their own — launching “design-first” startups like Airbnb, Etsy, Kickstarter, and Instagram. (For a quick trip down memory lane, look at John Maeda’s Design in Tech report.) Now we have Chief Design Officers and McKinsey-made interactive web experiences, all making the case for the business value of design.
Oddly enough, perhaps, this is good news. The move toward automated design software — and the spread of the everyman designer — pushes us to revisit where and when a designer is needed and to spell out more clearly what that value looks like. It nudges our practice away from being an undefinable creative gift and toward a measurable set of skills and competencies. And it spreads knowledge, both broadening our field and making it less mysterious.
Technology still requires seasoned designers, now more than ever: design that keeps the end user and their needs in view and that pushes for useful, ethical answers to complicated problems. This work demands a deliberate, careful use of empathy, strategy, communication, and management of the technology itself, all through a creative lens. These abilities, which cannot be automated, are the ones designers will need to rely on in the future:
Designer as systems architect
As organizations, product complexity, and new feature launches have sped up, so has the challenge of preserving cohesion and consistency. Digital designers need to take on a systems mindset, looking for ways to create scalable solutions to product problems. They need to meet the many needs of varied user groups while still maintaining standards for brand, usability, and accessibility. At the same time, they must discover ways to explain those choices to any number of contributors, internal and external, inside that ecosystem.
Design systems are one answer to scale. Built from a shared collection of guidelines and often paired with a library of reusable components, these systems have transformed how teams make digital products over the last decade, including Apple’s HIG, Google’s Material Design, IBM’s Carbon, and Shopify’s Polaris. (Disclosure: I work on Google’s Material Design team.)
Design systems give teams a way to standardize design decisions and strengthen coherence across a product, while also saving time by preventing duplicated work and making it simple for teams to quickly locate and source ready-made solutions to design problems.
Components and palettes are among the building blocks of these systems, and can be distributed and refreshed across an organization with ease through software. Design tokens push that codification a step further, literally encoding style details such as color and fonts, and pushing those values throughout a product’s design files.
Recorded decisions about, say, button width or type size can speed up the design process and let engineering partners independently solve design problems as they surface. When those same systems are checked against web accessibility standards, they help ensure that all designs are accessible. (As an industry, however, we still have a long way to go in creating truly accessible experiences.)
Part of this means giving up some control. Consider Figma’s recently shipped branching feature. With it, anyone using that system can propose changes to a component and commit them back. Once upstream approval is pending, the change may be merged back into the original system and spread across all designs that use that component, a process similar to how engineers fork and merge in GitHub. Time will tell whether this method is equally useful for design workflows, but it points toward a trend of democratization and new contribution models.
Designer as product manager
Design does not exist in a vacuum. Designers work closely with engineers, researchers, product managers, and other stakeholders to bring work to fruition. More recently, the rise of remote work among so-called knowledge workers has created a desperate need for more effective cross-functional collaboration.
Software has scrambled to fill that gap, with the aforementioned apps offering browser-based brainstorming and smoothing handoffs between design and development. Designers are needed to bridge these gaps further. One route is by improving trust and communication through greater transparency in the design process. Designers need to lower the walls around their work and bring others in earlier, instead of waiting to share a polished-finish file. As Figma reports, that’s already happening: the first collaborator now views a Figma file an average of 10 days after creation, down from 19 in 2019.
Just as design reflects user needs, business and cost cannot be ignored (alas!), so it falls to designers to create alignment. By stepping into the role of facilitator, a designer might create the spaces and conversations where these often competing needs are discussed, prioritized, and carried across various workstreams.
We can finally put to rest the question: Should designers code? That debate was always less about coding skill and more about pushing designers to understand development constraints and build convincing prototypes to show interactions and ideas. Software supports both with tools that reflect those limitations, improve handoffs between designers and developers, and provide code-free prototyping. Perhaps now the question is: Should designers be product managers?
Designer as user advocate
Pulled between product, business, and user needs, designers should elevate the latter. The end user, usually not in the room when a product is being developed, lacks representation; it is the designer’s responsibility to speak up for them.
Those needs are wide-ranging, covering everything from accessibility and core product goals to data privacy. Designers with deep product knowledge and an approach grounded in empathy are well positioned to sort out and rank the competing interests of the business, product, and user. Making a decision about whether to keep the user scrolling ad nauseum within, say, a popular photo-sharing app, may satisfy product goals around engagement or business goals around ad revenue, but come up short on a sticky user goal around mental health and well-being.
To address those needs, designers often push for research and testing to see how a product meets or falls short of user needs, conduct interviews and focus groups with target demographics, and examine how users engage with the product. This means questioning biases and rejecting ideas of “edge cases” — especially when it comes to marginalized communities and environments worthy of investment. And it means maintaining an ethical standard — one that, at minimum, lessens unintended harm and, at best, actively works to meaningfully improve the lives of people interacting with the product.
Above all, user-centered design means asking why again and again — why this, why now, why this way. It carries a heavy responsibility that arguably should not be automated.
Software that lets designers spend less time stuck on small aesthetic choices and technical execution also lets them take on broader responsibilities inside product teams. At its best, automation frees designers to address real problems for the users they speak for. Although standardizing design decisions may seem limiting to a designer used to creative freedom, it can also widen the meaning of design to serve a broader range of human needs.
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The case for heterogeneity
At the start of digital design in the 1990s, everything was new. Like a toddler learning a sense of personal style, webmakers tried cascading buttons, wild glitter gifs, scrolling marquees, and trailing cursors. (And it was great.) As the field grew up, many of those techniques slipped into the honored archives of internet history, while others, like the hamburger menu, moved to the front, becoming user interface canon.
Today, designers mostly follow industry best practices to create approachable products. Many of these practices are built into design systems and simple to use, making plain, well-designed — if merely designed — sites and apps common. This is a natural progression: as teams optimize for the best way to solve problems, whether accessibility or usability, they land on similar results. In designing the best for the most, the outcome has been a systematization of design, one that makes locating a hamburger menu or settings tab in an app a nearly instinctive task.
With this standardization, though, we’ve seen criticism of homogenous design. To quote Figma designer Molly Mielke’s earlier post: “As technology advances, software will increasingly be chosen not just for how well it addresses its use case, but how it conveys its personality, similar to how we choose our clothes.” Shouldn’t our devices account for that?
It may seem counterintuitive that scalable design systems are essential for enabling more expressive, personal experiences, but such systems are opening new chances for individualization. One recent example is Municipal Golf, a project in which users can mint a golf ball NFT generated from a design system (made up of a color scheme and graphics elements) that are systematically arranged to produce consistent, yet unique images. CryptoPunks are similar — while not truly personalized, the characters are individualized at scale through a design system.
Just as tokens carry values across a system, they can be written to depend on specific inputs, such as the colors of an individual’s phone background. Google’s latest update to its Material Design system uses this with Material You, a set of features that personalize devices according to individual preferences. With dynamic color, a photo someone uploads as their background can supply color inputs that are then systematically echoed across the device’s interface — say, shifting the UI to various blue, yellow, and orange hues in response to Edvard Munch’s Scream — all while preserving color contrast accessibility standards.
The future of design is personal
Despite an ever-growing list of job demands and shrinking autonomy when it comes to shaping digital experiences, it’s a great time to be a designer in tech. (I know, I can’t believe I’m saying it either. You would think the hours spent staring into this damn browser window would have broken me down by now.) And yet, I can’t help but feel a flicker of optimism. It’s exciting.
Designers today are uniquely positioned to influence the future of technology — and have endless tools available to do it. They have accountability, credibility, and crucial roles to play in deciding what that future looks like.
Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, the software that enables anyone to become a designer lifts our practice as a whole. As the design field becomes functionally more approachable, it opens more entry points for new voices.
The next stage of design will push all designers to raise their craft beyond the templated or automated. It will push designers to build more thoughtful experiences to solve problems at scale, work across traditional organizational boundaries, and advocate for the people using these products. And it will be deeply, incredibly personal.