It has never been a better time to be a designer

Or anyone who makes things.

Everyone I follow seems to be writing the same post right now. AI is coming for the craft. Jobs are disappearing. Everything is starting to look the same.

Some of that is true. But I’ve been designing for nearly twenty years, only for screens, and I have never felt less restricted than I do today.

For most of my career, the work happened inside other people’s limits.

The software decided what you could make. If a tool couldn’t do something, you didn’t do it, and after a while you stopped imagining it.

The budget decided how far an idea could go. A great idea that needed a developer for three weeks was a bad idea, because there was no developer for three weeks.

Then you’d hand your work over and get back something that looked half like it. You’d hear “the website can’t do that.” You’d wait weeks for someone to get to it.

So you learned to cut your own ideas early, because you already knew how the conversation would go.

And because every tool took years to learn, you picked one and stayed there. Most of our job titles came from that. Now the limits are going, and the titles feel shaky with them. I think a lot of what reads as fear of AI is grief for a job description. That’s a different thing from the craft dying.

A small example. Harvest, the time tracking software we use at Pony, put its price up to eleven times what we’d been paying. So I built our own.

It took two days - a few hours a day. It runs smoothly, it doesn’t break, and it does far more than Harvest did, because it’s built around exactly how we work. A few months ago this would have been a shaky experiment. Now it just works.

I used to do a bit of front-end coding about 10 years ago, but I barely remember any of it these days.

The distance between having an idea and holding the working thing has almost gone. You can sketch something on paper in the morning and have it moving by the afternoon. You learn faster than I thought was possible. A curious person can get further in a week now than I used to get in years.

The bad news

Not everyone wins here. Lots of jobs, in design and well beyond it, were translation jobs. Someone else made the decision, and you turned it into the finished thing. That work is shrinking very fast. If it was your job, this is a hard moment, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

It’s harder for businesses like mine too. When clients can make more themselves, output on its own stops being worth much. What’s left is judgement: knowing what to make, and knowing when it’s good.

So the freedom is here, but so is the higher bar.

The barrier is mostly in your head

Most people think starting needs a free week, the right setup and a stack of tutorials. It doesn’t. You can start on the go, on the train - from your phone. Open Claude, describe what you want and build from there.

I’m convinced 99% of the barrier is mental. Most people who think they can’t do this could start today.

Drop the CV

I see this in the applications that come to Pony. Cliché CVs. Portfolios built almost entirely on work from university.

I say this with real affection: drop the CV. A CV tells me where you were allowed to work. I want to see what you make when nobody gives you a brief. That goes for any field.

Where I’d start

Set your own brief. Pick a brand, a product or a process you think could be better, decide what it should become, and make it.

Build one small tool that removes something annoying from your week.

Take one idea from a scribble to something that works in a single day.

Study the best people in your field for hours. Ask why their simple choices work, why the same move falls flat when you try it, and what they chose to leave out. That’s how taste gets built, and taste is the part no tool can hand you.

Go wide. There has never been a better time to be a generalist, or a more important one.

Notice where your energy goes. Every hour spent on the fear is an hour not spent making something.

What’s next

I don’t know what any of this looks like in five years, and I don’t think you need to. Nobody has the full picture. Relax into it, follow it wherever it goes, and figure it out on the way.

We need more excitement, more experimenting, and a lot less living in the frame.

I haven’t enjoyed making things this much since I started.

Love,
Stef