In the early 2000s to the mid-oughts, every designer I knew wanted to be featured on the FWA, a showcase for cutting-edge web design. While many of the earlier sites were Flash-based, it’s also where I discovered the first uses of parallax, Paper.js, and Three.js. Back then, websites were meant to be explored and their interfaces discovered.

A grid of winners from The FWA in 2009. Source: Rob Ford.

One of my favorite sites of that era was Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, where users could type free text into a chat box to command a man dressed in a chicken suit. In a full circle moment that perfectly captures where we are today, we now type commands into chat boxes to tell AI what to do.

Cold Arrival

It’s 11 degrees Fahrenheit as I step off the plane at Toronto Pearson International. I’ve been up for nearly 24 hours and am about to trek through the gates toward Canadian immigration. Getting here from 73-degree San Diego was a significant challenge. What would be a quick five-hour direct flight turned into a five-hour delay, then cancelation, and then a rebook onto a red-eye through SFO. And I can’t sleep on planes. On top of that, I’ve been recovering from the flu, so my head was still very congested, and the descents from two flights were excruciating.

After going for a short secondary screening for who knows what reason—the second Canada Border Services Agency officer didn’t know either—I make my way to the UP Express train and head towards downtown Toronto. Before reaching Union Station, the train stops at the Weston and Bloor stations, picking up scarfed, ear-muffed, and shivering commuters. I disembark at Union Station, find my way to the PATH, and headed towards the CN Tower. I’m staying at the Marriott attached to the Blue Jays stadium.

James Poniewozik, writing for The New York Times:

Whether they work in sand or spores, heavy-handed metaphor is the true material of choice for all these opening titles. The series are different in genres and tone. But all of them seem to have collectively decided that the best way to convey the sense of epic event TV is with an overture of shape-shifting, literal-minded screen-saver art.

His point is that a recent trend in “prestige TV” main titles is to use particle effects. Particle effects—if you don’t know—are simulations in 3D software that produce, well, particles that can be affected by gravity, wind, and each other—essentially physics. Particles can be styled to look like snow, rain, smoke, fireworks, flower petals, water (yes, water is just particles; see this excellent video from Corridor Digital), or even Mordor’s orc hoards. This functionality has been in After Effects for decades in 2D but has been making its way into 3D packages like Cinema 4D and Blender. There’s a very popular program now called Houdini, which does particle systems and other simulations really well. My theory is that because particle effects are simpler to produce and workstations with GPUs are cheaper and easier to come by, these effects are simply more within reach. They certainly look expensive.

Appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Apple “[hasn’t] really invented anything great in a while. Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later.”

Let’s take a look at some hard metrics, shall we?

I did a search of the USPTO site for patents filed by Apple and Meta since 2007. In that time period, Apple filed for 44,699 patents. Meta, nee Facebook, filed for 4,839, or about 10% of Apple’s inventions.

Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, in their annual The State of UX report:

Despite all the transformations we’re seeing, one thing we know for sure: Design (the craft, the discipline, the science) is not going anywhere. While Design only became a more official profession in the 19th century, the study of how craft can be applied to improve business dates back to the early 1800s. Since then, only one thing has remained constant: how Design is done is completely different decade after decade. The change we’re discussing here is not a revolution, just an evolution. It’s simply a change in how many roles will be needed and what they will entail. “Digital systems, not people, will do much of the craft of (screen-level) interaction design.”

Scary words for the UX design profession as it stares down the coming onslaught of AI. Our industry isn’t the first one to face this—copywriters, illustrators, and stock photographers have already been facing the disruption of their respective crafts. All of these creatives have had to pivot quickly. And so will we.