Judgment and craft may help a designer survive today’s freelance market. But Madeleine Morley, writing for Fast Company, gives us little reason to believe that either would guarantee economic security.
She interviewed Cari Sekendur, founder of the independent branding and web-design studio Butter.
In Fast Company ’s report, more than half of designers surveyed believe AI is undercutting their rates, and 68% believe it is eroding the value of human creativity.
“Clients now expect more while paying less,” wrote one survey respondent on AI’s effect on the industry. “Many clients are taking advantage of AI to underestimate our professionalism and pricing,” said another.
Morley writes that only 22% of survey respondents reported losing work because of AI. But the lowish number hides a sense that “AI isn’t replacing design, but it is changing how clients perceive it.” A designer can keep getting hired and still lose leverage over what the work pays and demands.
That pressure isn’t distributed evenly. She describes what has happened among illustrators doing smaller jobs:
Eric Carter, an illustrator whose clients include The New York Times, believes the disruption has been most acute at the lower end of the market. “There is this whole gig economy of illustrators doing smaller jobs,” he says from his studio in Los Angeles. “Fiverr was already cheapening everything… the bottom was already pretty low. And then having AI replace that, it just cut it out.”
Carter has been insulated from that shift because, as he puts it, “I get paid to think.” This idea—that a designer’s value is increasingly about their taste and approach as opposed to pure craft or technical ability—reverberates throughout the freelance industry. “You can’t automate taste and creativity,” one survey respondent wrote. Another: “Ideas and taste is what is needed to succeed.” And another: “AI is only as good as the strategy and input.”
Carter’s “I get paid to think” is encouraging, but it comes with a nasty condition. Judgment and recognizable craft offer more protection when clients already know whose judgment they’re buying. I wrote about the same trap in my series on the design talent crisis: entry-level work is how designers develop and prove their judgment, yet it’s the first work the market is stripping away.
Morley concludes:
What is evident across the survey data and multiple interviewers is that the labor of design is increasingly fragmented in today’s creative industry. Designers are forced to sell their labor in multiple markets simply to maintain the same standard of living that they used to and the market is not compensating highly skilled creative work in the way it did even a few years ago.
All of this raises bigger questions. For many years now, the freelance creative has been not only someone who simply sells their craft, but an entrepreneur expected to market themselves and build a personal brand. Diversification and resilience are emerging as absolutely vital and central capacities for freelancers navigating the age of AI. What gets lost in the urgent need to find sources of income and to adapt are questions like: Shouldn’t clients pay more? Why are corporations cutting budgets? The burden, as always, shifts to the individual.
