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.

The Wild West mentality of web design meant designers and creative technologists were free to make things look cool. Agencies like R/GA, Big Spaceship, AKQA, Razorfish, and CP+B all won numerous awards for clients like Nike, BMW, and Burger King. But as with all frontiers, civilization eventually arrives with its rules and constraints.

The Robots Are Looking

Last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and a couple of others from the company demonstrated Operator, their AI agent. You’ll see them go through a happy path and have Operator book a reservation on OpenTable. The way it works is that the AI agent is reading a screenshot of the page and deciding how to interact with the UI. (Reminds me of the promise of the Rabbit R1.)

Let me repeat: the AI is interpreting UI by looking at it. Inputs need to look like inputs. Buttons need to look like buttons. Links need to look like links and be obvious.

In recent years, there’s been a push in the web dev community for accessibility. Complying with WCAG standards for building websites has become a positive trend. Now, we know the unforeseen secondary effect is to unlock AI browsing of sites. If links are underlined and form fields are self-evident, an agent like Operator can interpret where to click and where to enter data.

(To be honest, I’m surprised they’re using screenshots instead of interpreting the HTML as automated testing software would.)

The Economics of Change

Since Perplexity and Arc Search came onto the scene last year, the web’s economic foundation has started to shift. For the past 30 years, we’ve built a networked human knowledge store that’s always been designed for humans to consume. Sure, marketers and website owners got smart and figured out how to game the system to rank higher on Google. But ultimately, ranking higher led to more clicks and traffic to your website.

But the digerati are worried. Casey Newton of Platformer, writing about web journalism (emphasis mine):

The death of digital media has many causes, including the ineptitude of its funders and managers. But today I want to talk about another potential rifle on the firing squad: generative artificial intelligence, which in its capacity to strip-mine the web and repurpose it as an input for search engines threatens to remove one of the few pillars of revenue remaining for publishers.

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge points out:

That means that Perplexity is basically a rent-seeking middleman on high-quality sources. The value proposition on search, originally, was that by scraping the work done by journalists and others, Google’s results sent traffic to those sources. But by providing an answer, rather than pointing people to click through to a primary source, these so-called “answer engines” starve the primary source of ad revenue — keeping that revenue for themselves.

Their point is that the fundamental symbiotic economic relationship between search engines and original content websites is changing. Instead of sending traffic to websites, search engines, and AI answer engines are scraping the content directly and providing them within their platforms.

Christopher Butler captures this broader shift in his essay “Who is the internet for?”:

Old-school SEO had a fairly balanced value proposition: Google was really good at giving people sources for the information they need and benefitted by running advertising on websites. Websites benefitted by getting attention delivered to them by Google. In a “clickless search” scenario, though, the scale tips considerably.

This isn’t just about news organizations—it’s about the fundamental relationship between websites, search engines, and users.

The Designer’s Dilemma

As the web is increasingly consumed not by humans but by AI robots, should we as designers continue to care what websites look like? Or, put another way, should we begin optimizing websites for the bots?

The art of search engine optimization, or SEO, was already pushing us in that direction. It turned personality-driven copywriting into “content” with keyword density and headings for the Google machine rather than for poetic organization. But with GPTbot slurping up our websites, should we be more straightforward in our visual designs? Should we add more copy?

Not Dead Yet

It’s still early to know if AI optimization (AIO?) will become a real thing. Changes in consumer behavior happen over many single-digit years, not months. As of November 2024, ChatGPT is eighth on the list of the most visited websites globally, ranked by monthly traffic. Google is first with 291 times ChatGPT’s traffic.

Top global websites by monthly users as of November 2024. Source: SEMRush.

Interestingly, as Google rolled out its AI overview for many of its search results, the sites cited by Gemini do see a high clickthrough rate, essentially matching the number one organic spot. It turns out that nearly 40% of us want more details than what the answer engine tells us. That’s a good thing.

Clickthrough rates by entities on the Google search results page. Source: FirstPageSage, January 2025.

Finding the Sweet Spot

There’s a fear that AI answer engines and agentic AI will be the death of creative web design. But what if we’re looking at this all wrong? What if this evolution presents an interesting creative challenge instead?

Just as we once pushed the boundaries of Flash and JavaScript to create award-winning experiences for FWA, designers will need to find innovative ways to work within new constraints. The fact that AI agents like Operator need obvious buttons and clear navigation isn’t necessarily a death sentence for creativity—it’s just a new set of constraints to work with. After all, some of the most creative periods in web design came from working within technical limitations. (Remember when we did layouts using tables?!)

The accessibility movement has already pushed us to think about making websites more structured and navigable. The rise of AI agents is adding another dimension to this evolution, pushing us to find that sweet spot between machine efficiency and human delight.

From the Subservient Chicken to ChatGPT, from Flash microsites to AI-readable interfaces, web design continues to evolve. The challenge now isn’t just making sites that look cool or rank well—it’s creating experiences that serve both human visitors and their AI assistants effectively. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.

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.

Outside the station, the bitter cold slaps me across the face. Even though I am bundled with a hat, gloves, and big jacket, I still am unprepared for what feels like nine-degree weather. I roll my suitcase across the light green-salted concrete, evidence of snowfall just days earlier, with my exhaled breath puffing before me like the smoke from a coal-fired train engine.

I finally make it to the hotel, pass the zigzag vestibule—because vestibules are a thing in the Northeast, unlike Southern California—and my wife is there waiting to greet me with a cup of black coffee. (She had arrived the day before to meet up with a colleague.) I enter my room, take a hot shower, change, and I’m back out again into the freezing cold, walking the block-and-a-half to my company’s downtown Toronto office—though now with some caffeine in my system. It’s go time.

The Three-Day Sprint

Like many companies, my company recently debuted a return to office or RTO policy. Employees who live close by need to come in three days per week, while others who live farther away need to go to the office once a month. This story is not about RTO mandates, at least not directly. I’m not going to debate the merits of the policy, though I will explore some nuances around it. Instead, I want to focus on the benefits of in-person collaboration.

The reason I made the cross-country trip to spend time with my team of product designers despite my illness and the travel snafus, is because we had to ship a big feature by a certain deadline, and this was the only way to get everyone aligned and pointed in the same direction quickly.

Two weeks prior, during the waning days of 2024, we realized that a particular feature was behind schedule and that we needed to ship within Q1. One of our product managers broke down the scope of work into discrete pieces of functionality, and I could see that it was way too much for just one of our designers to handle. So, I huddled with my team’s design manager and devised a plan. We divided the work among three designers. For me to guarantee to my stakeholders—the company’s leadership team and an important customer—I needed to feel good about where the feature was headed from a design perspective. Hence, this three-day design sprint (or swarm) in Toronto was planned.

I wanted to spend two to three hours with the team for three consecutive days. We needed to understand the problem together and keep track of the overall vision so that each designer’s discrete flow connected seamlessly to the overall feature. (Sorry to dance around what this feature is, but because it’s not yet public, I can’t be any more specific.)

The plan was:

• Day 1 (morning): The lead designer reviews the entire flow. He sets the table and helps the other designers understand the persona, this part of the product, and its overall purpose. The other designers also walk through their understanding of the flows and functionality they’re responsible for.
• Day 2 (afternoon): Every designer presents low-fidelity sketches or wireframes of their key screens.
• Day 3 (afternoon): Open studio if needed.

But after Day 1, the plan went out the window. Going through all the flows in the initial session was overly ambitious. We needed half of the second day’s session to finish all the flows. However, we all left the room with a good understanding of the direction of the design solutions.

And I was OK with that. You see, my team is relatively green, and my job is to steer the ship in the right direction. I’m much less concerned about the UI than the overall experience.

Super low-fi whiteboard sketch of a screen. This is enough to go by.

On Day 3, the lead designer, the design manager, and I broke down one of the new features on the whiteboard, sketching what each major screen would look like—which form fields we’d need to display, how the tables would work, and the task flows. At some point, the designer doing most of the sketching—it was his feature, after all—said, “Y’know, it’d be easier if we just jumped into FigJam or Figma for the rest.” I said no. Let’s keep it on the whiteboard. Because honestly, I knew that we would fuss too much when using a digital tool. On the whiteboard, it allowed us to work out abstract concepts in a very low-fidelity and, therefore, facile way. This was better. Said designer learned a good lesson.

Just after two hours, we cracked the feature. We had sketched out all the primary screens and flows on the whiteboard. I was satisfied the designer knew how to execute. Because we did that together, there would be less stakeholder management he’d have to do with me. Now, I can be an advocate for this direction and help align with other stakeholders. (Which I did this past week, in fact.)

The Power of Presence

Keep the Work Sessions Short

I purposely did not make these sessions all day long. I kept them to just a couple hours each to leave room for designers to have headphone time and design. I also set the first meeting for the morning to get everyone on the same page. The other meetings were booked for the afternoon, so the team had time to work on solutions and share those.

Presence Is Underrated

When the world was in lockdown, think about all the group chats and Zoom happy hours you had with your friends. Technology allowed us to stay connected but was no replacement for in-person time. Now think about how happy you felt when you could see them IRL, even if socially distanced. The power of that presence applies to work, too. There’s an ease to the conversation that is distinctly better than the start-stop of Zoom, where people raise hands or interrupt each other because of the latency of the connection.

No Replacement for Having Lunch Together

I’ve attended virtual lunches and happy hours before on Zoom. They are universally awkward. But having lunch in person with someone is great. Conversation flows more naturally, and you’re building genuine rapport, not faking it.

FigJam Is No Match for a Whiteboard and Working Expo Marker

Sketching super lo-fi screens is quick on a whiteboard. In FigJam, minutes are wasted as you’re battling with rectangles, the grid snap, and text size and color decisions. Additionally, standing at the whiteboard and explaining as you draw is immensely powerful. It helps the sketcher work out their thoughts, and the viewer understands the thinking. The physicality of it all is akin to performance art.

The RTO Question

As I said, I don’t want to wade into the RTO debate directly. There have already been a lot of great think pieces on it. But I can add to the conversation as a designer and leader of a team of designers.

As I’ve illustrated in this essay, being together in person is wonderful and powerful. By our very nature, humans are social creatures, and we need to be with our compatriots. Collaboration is not only easier and more effective, but it also allows us to make genuine connections with our coworkers.

At the same time, designers need focus time to do our work. Much of our job is talking with users for research and validation, with fellow designers to receive critical feedback, and with PMs, engineers, and all others to collaborate. But when it comes to pushing pixels, we need uninterrupted headphone time. And that’s hard to come by in an open office plan, of which I’m sure 95% of all offices are these days.

In this article by David Brooks from 2022 in The New York Times, he lists study after study that adds to the growing evidence that open-plan offices are just plain bad.

We talk less with each other.

A much-cited study by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban found that when companies made the move to more open plan offices, workers had about 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions, while email and instant messaging use rose.

We’re more stressed.

In 2011 psychologist Matthew Davis and others reviewed over 100 studies about office environments. A few years later Maria Konnikova reported on what he found in The New Yorker — that the open space plans “were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation.”

And we are less productive.

A 2020 study by Helena Jahncke and David Hallman found that employees in quieter one-person cell offices performed 14 percent better than employees in open plan offices on a cognitive task.

I’m also pretty sure the earlier studies cited in the Brooks article analyzed offices with cubicles, not rows and rows of six-foot tables with two designers each.

The Lure of Closed-Door Offices

Fantasy floor plan of Sterling Cooper by Brandi Roberts.

Many years ago, when I was at Rosetta, I shared a tiny, closed-door office with our head strategy guy, Tod Rathbone. Though cramped, it was a quiet space where Tod wrote briefs, and I worked on pitch decks and resourcing spreadsheets.

In the past, creatives often had private offices despite the popularity of open-layout bullpens. For instance, in the old Hal Riney building in Fisherman’s Wharf, every floor had single-person offices along the perimeter, some with stunning waterfront views. Even our bullpen teams had semi-private cubicles and plenty of breakout spaces to brainstorm. Advertising agencies understood how to design creative workspaces.

Steve Jobs also understood how to design spaces that fostered collaboration. He worked closely with the architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson to design the headquarters of Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville. In Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs said…

If a building doesn’t encourage [chance encounters and unplanned collaborations], you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.

The atrium at Pixar headquarters.

Reimagining the Office

**

I work at home and I’m lucky enough to have a lovely home office. It’s filled with design books, vinyl records, and Batman and Star Wars collectibles. All things that inspire me and make me happy.

My desk setup is pretty great as well. I have a clacky mechanical keyboard, an Apple Studio Display, a Wacom tablet, and a sweet audio setup.

When I go into my company’s offices in Los Angeles and Toronto, I just have my laptop. Our hoteling monitors aren’t great—just 1080p. There’s just no reason to plug in my MacBook Pro.

I’ve been at other companies where the hoteling situation is similar, so I don’t think this is unique to where I work now.

Pre-pandemic, the situation was reversed. Not many of us had perfect home office setups, if at all. We had to go into the office because that’s where we had all our nice equipment and the reference materials necessary to do our jobs. The pandemic flipped that dynamic.

Back to the RTO mandates, I think there could be compromises. Leadership likes to see their expensive real estate filled with workers. The life of a high-up leader is talking to people—employees, customers, partners, etc. But those on the ground performing work that demands focus, like software engineering and designing, need uninterrupted, long, contiguous chunks of time. We must get into the flow state and stay there to design and build stuff. That’s nearly impossible in the office, especially in an open-plan office layout.

So here are some ideas for companies to consider:

• Make the office better than your employees’ home setups. Of course, not everyone has a dedicated home office like I do, but by now, they probably have a good setup in place. Reverse that. Give employees spaces that’s theirs so they can have the equipment they want and personalize it to their liking.
• Add more closed-door offices. Don’t just reserve them for executives; have enough single-person offices with doors for roles that really need focus. It’s a lot of investment in real estate and furniture, but workers will look forward to spaces they can make their own and where they can work uninterrupted.
• Add more cubicles. The wide open plan with no or low dividers gives workers zero privacy. If more offices are out of the question, semi-private cubicles are the next best thing.
• Limit in-person days to two or three. As I’ve said earlier in the essay, I love being in person for collaboration. But then, we need time for heads-down-focused work at some point. Companies should consider having people in the office for only two or three days. But don’t expect designers and engineers to push many pixels or write much code.
• Cut down on meetings. Scheduled meetings are the bane of any designer’s existence because they cut into our focus time. I tend to want to have my meetings earlier in the day so I can save the rest of the day for actual work. Meetings should be relegated to the mornings or just the afternoons, and this applies to in-office days as well.

After being in freezing Toronto for four days, I arrive back home to sunny San Diego. It’s a perfect 68 degrees. I get out of the Uber with my suitcase and lug it into the house. I settle into my Steelcase chair and then log onto Zoom for a meeting with the feature stakeholders, feeling confident that my team of designers will get it done.

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.

Anyhow, I love it when mainstream media covers design. It brings a necessary visibility to our profession, especially in the age of generative AI. The article is worth checking out (gift article) because Poniewozik embeds a bunch of videos within it.

This is also an excuse to plug one of my favorite TV main title sequences of all time, True Blood by Digital Kitchen. It’s visceral, hypnotic, and utterly unstoppable. I watched it every time.

In an interview with Watch the Titles! in 2009, Rama Allen, lead designer and concept co-creator of the sequence:

After dipping ourselves in Southern Gothic, from Powers Boothe in Southern Comfort to digesting a pile of Harry Crews novels, one of the biggest ideas we latched onto was “the whore in the house of prayer.” This delicate balance of the sacred and profane co-existing creates powerful imagery. Editorially, we collided the seething behind-the-curtains sexuality of the South into the fist-pounding spirituality of Pentecostal healings to viscerally expose the conflicts we saw in the narrative of the show. Holy rollers flirt with perversion while godless creatures seek redemption.

Another all-time favorite of mine is, of course, Mad Men by Imaginary Forces. Looking at this sequence again after having finished the series, it’s impressive how well it captures Don Draper’s story in just over 30 seconds.

In an interview with Art of the Title in 2011, creative directors Steve Fuller and Mark Gardner point out the duality of the 1950s and ’60 eras’ characters—projecting respectability while giving in to their vices. This contrast became a key influence on the sequence’s design, reflecting the tension between their polished exteriors and hidden complexities.

Steve Fuller:

Yeah, one thing that Matthew [Weiner] said kept echoing in my head. He said, “This is an era of guys wanting to be the head of the PTA but also drink, smoke, and get laid as much as possible.” That was the kind of dual life these guys were leading and that’s what was interesting.

The best titles give the viewer a sense of the story and its world while being visually interesting and holding the audience for up to a minute while the name cards roll.

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.

You can argue that not all companies file for patents for everything, or that Zuck said Apple hasn’t “really invented anything great in a while.” Great being the keyword here.

He left out the following “great” Apple inventions since 2007:

• App Store (2008)
• iPad (2010)
• Apple Pay (2014)
• Swift (2014)
• Apple Watch (2015)
• AirPods (2016)
• Face ID (2017)
• Neural engine SoC (2017)
• SwiftUI (2019)
• Apple silicon (2020)
• Vision Pro (2023) [arguable, since it wasn’t a commercial success, but definitely a technical feat]

The App Store, I’d argue, is on the same level as the iPhone because it opened up an entire new economy for developers, resulting in an astounding $935 billion market in 2025. Apple Watch might be a close second, kicking off a $38 billion market for smartwatches.

Let’s think about Meta’s since 2007, excluding acquisitions*:

• Facebook Messenger (2011)
• React (2013)
• React Native (2015)
• GraphQL (2015)
• PyTorch (2016)
• Ray-Ban Stories (2021)
• Llama (2023)

*Yes, excluding acquisitions, as Zuckerberg is talking about inventions. That’s why WhatsApp, Instagram, and Quest are not included. Anything I’m missing on this list?

As you can see, other than Messenger and the Ray-Ban glasses, the rest of Meta’s inventions are aimed at developers, not consumers. I’m being a little generous.

Update 1/12/2025

I’ve added some products to the lists above based on some replies to my Threads post. I also added a sentence to clarify excluding acquisitions.

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.

Teixeira and Braga remind us that “Design is not going anywhere,” and that “how Design is done is completely different decade after decade.”

UX Is a Relatively Young Discipline

If you think about it, the UX design profession has already evolved significantly. When I started in the industry as a graphic designer in the early 1990s, web design wasn’t a thing, much less user experience design. I met my first UX design coworker at marchFIRST, when Chris Noessel and I collaborated on Sega.com. Chris had studied at the influential Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. If I recall correctly, Chris’ title was information architect as UX designer wasn’t a popular title yet. Regardless, I marveled at how Chris used card sorting with Post-It notes to determine the information architecture of the website. And together we came up with the concept that the website itself would be a game, obvious only to visitors who paid attention. (Alas, that part of the site was never built, as we simply ran out of time. Oh, the dot-com days were fun.)

“User experience” was coined by Don Norman in the mid-1990s. When he joined Apple in 1993, he settled on the title of “user experience architect.” In an email interview with Peter Merholz in 1998, Norman said:

I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.

As the thirst for all things digital proliferated, design rose to meet the challenge. Design schools started to add interaction design to their curricula, and lots of younger graphic designers were adapting and working on websites. We used the tools we knew—Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop—and added Macromedia Director and Flash as projects allowed.

Director was the tool of choice for those making CD-ROMs in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch in the early 1990s. It was an easy transition for designers and developers when the web arrived just a few years later in the dot-com boom.

In a short span of twenty years, designers added many mediums to their growing list: CD-ROMs, websites, WAP sites, responsive websites, mobile apps, tablet apps, web apps, and AR/VR experiences.

Designers have had to understand the limitations of each medium, picking up craft skills, and learning best practices. But I believe, good designers have had one thing remain constant: they know how to connect businesses with their audiences. They’re the translation layer, if you will. (Notice how I have not said how to make things look good.)

From Concept to Product Strategy

Concept. Back then, that’s how I referred to creative strategy. It was drilled into me at design school and in my first job as a designer. Sega.com was a game in and of itself to celebrate gamers and gaming. Pixar.com was a storybook about how Pixar made its movies, emphasizing its storytelling prowess. The Mitsubishi Lancer microsite leaned on the Lancer’s history as a rally car, reminding visitors of its racing heritage. These were all ideas that emotionally connected the brand with the consumer, to lean on what the audience knew to be true and deepened it.

When I designed Pixar.com, I purposefully made the site linear, like a storybook.

Concept was also the currency of creative departments at ad agencies. The classic copywriter and art director pairing came up with different ideas for ads. These ideas aren’t just executions of TV commercials. Instead, they were the messages the brands wanted to convey, in a way that consumers would be open to them.

I would argue that concept is also product strategy. It’s the point of view that drives a product—whether it’s a marketing website, a cryptocurrency mobile app, or a vertical SaaS web app. Great product strategy connects the business with the user and how the product can enrich their lives. Enrichment can come in many forms. It can be as simple as saving users a few minutes of tedium, or transforming an analog process into a digital one, therefore unlocking new possibilities.

UI Is Already a Commodity

In more recent years, with the rise of UI kits, pre-made templates, and design systems like Material UI, the visual design of user interfaces has become a commodity. I call this moment “peak UI”—when fundamental user interface patterns have reached ubiquity, and no new patterns will or should be invented. Users take what they know from one interface and apply that knowledge to new ones. To change that is to break Jakob’s Law and reduce usability. Of course, when new modalities like voice and AI came on the scene, we needed to invent new user interface patterns, but those are few and far between.

And just like how AI-powered coding assistants are generating code based on human-written code, the leading UI software program Figma is training its AI on users’ files. Pretty soon, designers will be able to generate UIs via a prompt. And those generated UIs will be good enough because they’ll follow the patterns users are already familiar with. (Combined with an in-house design system, the feature will be even more useful.)

In one sense, this alleviates having to make yet another select input. Instead, opening up time for more strategic—and IMHO, more fun—challenges.

Three Minds

In today’s technology companies’ squad, aka Spotify model, every squad has a three-headed leadership team consisting of a product manager, a designer, and an engineering or tech lead. This cross-functional leadership team is a direct descendent of the copywriter-art director creative team pioneered by Bill Bernbach in 1960, sparking the so-called “creative revolution” in advertising.

Ads by DDB during the creative revolution of the 1960s. The firm paired copywriters and art directors to create ads centered on a single idea.

When I was at Organic in 2005, we debuted a mantra called, Three Minds.

Great advertising was often created in “pairs”—a copywriter and an art director. In the digital world, the creation process is more complex. Strategists, designers, information architects, media specialists, and technologists must come together to create great experiences. Quite simply, it takes ThreeMinds.

At its most simplistic, PMs own the why; designers, own the what; and engineers own the how. But the creative act is a lot messier than that and the lines aren’t as firm in practice.

The reality is there’s blurriness between each discipline’s area of responsibility. I asked my friend, Byrne Reese, Group Product Manager at RingCentral, about that fuzziness between PMs and designers, and here’s what he had to say:

I have a bias towards letting a PM drive product strategy. But a good product designer will have a strong point of view here, because they will also see the big picture alongside the PM. It is hard for them not to because for them to do their role well, they need to do competitive analysis, they need to talk to customers, they need to understand the market. Given that, they can’t help it but have a point of view on product strategy.

Shawn Smith, a product management and UX consultant, sees product managers owning a bit more of everything, but ultimately reinforces the point that it’s messy:

Product managers cover some of the why (why x is a relevant problem at all, why it’s a priority, etc), often own the what (what’s the solution we plan to pursue), and engage with designers and engineers on the how (how the solution will be built and how it will ultimately manifest).

Rise of the Product Designer

In the last few years, companies have switched from hiring UX designers to hiring product designers.

The Google Trends data here isn’t conclusive, but you can see a slow decline for “UX design” starting in January 2023 and a steady incline for “product design” since 2021. In September 2024, “product design” overtook “UX design.” (The jump at the start of 2022 is due to a change in Google’s data collection system, so look at the relative comparison between the two lines.)

Zooming out, UX design and product design had been neck and neck. But once the zero interest-rate period (ZIRP) era hit and tech companies were flush with cash, there’s a jump in UX design. My theory is because companies could afford to have designers focus on their area of expertise—optimizing user interactions. At around March 2022, when ZIRP was coming to an end and the tech layoffs started, UX design declines while product design rises.

Looking at the jobs posted on LinkedIn at the moment, and you’ll find nearly 70% more product designer job postings than ones for UX designer—1,354 versus 802.

As Christoper K. Wong wrote so succinctly, product design is overtaking UX. Companies are demanding more from their designers.

Design Has Always Been About the Why

Steve Jobs famously once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Through my schooling and early experiences in the field, I’ve always known this and practiced my craft this way. Being a product designer suits me. (Well, being a designer suits me too, but that’s another post.)

Product design requires us designers to consider more than just the interactions on the screen or the right flows. I wrote earlier that—at its most simplistic—designers own the what. But product designers must also consider why we’re building whatever we’re building.

This dual focus on why and what isn’t new to design. When Charles and Ray Eames created their famous Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman in 1956, they aimed to design a chair that would offer its user respite from the “strains of modern living.” Just a couple of years later, Dieter Rams at Braun, would debut his T3 pocket radio, sparking the transition of music being a group activity to a personal one. The Sony Walkman and Apple iPod are clear direct descendants.

The Eameses and Rams showed us what great designers have always known: our job isn’t just about the surface, or even about how something works. It’s about asking the right questions about why products should exist and how they might enrich people’s lives.

As AI reshapes our profession—just as CD-ROMs, websites, and mobile apps did before—this ability to think strategically about the why becomes even more critical. The tools and techniques will keep changing, just as they have since my days in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch in the 1990s. But our core mission stays the same: we’re still that translation layer, creating meaningful connections between businesses and their audiences. That’s what design has always been about, and that’s what it will continue to be.

I recently read a post on Threads in which Stephen Beck wonders why the New York Times needs an external advertising agency when it already has an award-winning agency in-house. You can read the back-and-forth in the thread itself, but I think Nina Alter’s reply sums it up best:

Creatives need to be free to bring new perspectives. Drink other kool-aid. That’s much of the value in agencies.

This all got me thinking about the differences between working in-house and at an agency. As a designer who began my career bouncing from agency to agency before settling in-house, I’ve seen both sides of this debate firsthand. Many of my designer friends have had similar paths. So, I’ll speak from that perspective. It’s biased and probably a little outdated since I haven’t worked at an agency since 2020, and that was one that I owned.

I think the best path for a young designer is to work for agencies at the beginning of their careers. It’s sort of like casually dating when you first start dating. You quickly experience a bunch of different types of people. You figure out what your preferences are. You make mistakes. You learn a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses. And most importantly, you grow. This is all training for eventually settling down and investing in a long-term relationship with a partner.

Playing the Field: Becoming a Swiss Army Knife

My first full-time design job was for Dennis Crowe, a faculty member at CCA (California College of the Arts, fka CCAC, California College of the Arts when I attended there). To this day, he’s still my favorite boss I’ve ever had. He’s the one who taught me that design is design is design. In my four years at Zimmermann Crowe Design, I worked on packaging, retail graphics, retail fixtures, retail store design, brochures, magazine ads, logos and identities, motion graphics, and websites. The clients I got to work on included big brands like Levi’s, Foot Locker, and Nike. But I also worked with local clientele like Bob ’n’ Sheila’s Edit World (a local video editing company), Marin Academy (a local private high school), and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

There was a thrill in walking into the studio and designing for multiple clients with varying sensibilities on their projects. I really had to learn how to flex not only my design aesthetics but also my problem-solving skills.

I’d juggle multiple projects at a time. I might work on a retail fixture for Levi’s, specifying metals and powder coats, while also sketching on a logo for a photo lab.

The reason I left ZCD was that I had learned all that I could and wanted to work on websites. It was 1999 in San Francisco, at the peak of the multimedia Gold Rush. I wanted to be a part of that. So, I joined USWeb/CKS and began working on Levi.com. Despite having designed only two websites by that point in my career—my portfolio site and ZCD’s site—I was hired at a digital agency. To be fair, back then, CKS did a lot of print still; Apple and Kinko’s were both clients, and the firm did all their marketing.

During my tenure at USWeb/CKS (which then became marchFIRST), I worked on digital campaigns for Levi’s—including the main dot-com, microsites, and emails—web stuff for Apple and Sega, website pitches for Harley-Davidson and Toys “R” Us, and Pixar.com. Again, very different aesthetics, approaches, and strategies for each of those brands.

My career in agencies led to more brands, both consumer and B2B. My projects continued to include marketing sites but soon encompassed intranets, digital ads (aka banners), 360-degree advertising campaigns (brand and product launches), videos, owner events and experiences, and applications.

Working in agencies was exceptional training for me to become a generalist and a multipurpose Swiss Army knife.

Agencies: Built for Perfection

The other great thing about working at agencies is the built-in structure. If you’ve watched Mad Men you’ve seen it. On one side is account, or client services. Like Roger Sterling, they ensure the client is happy, but they’re also the voice of the customer internally. They’ll look at the work, put on their client hat, and make sure it’s on strategy and the client will be satisfied. On the other side is creative. Like Don Draper and his merry pranksters, they come up with the ideas. Extrapolate that to today’s world, and it’s just slightly more complicated. Strategy or planning, production, technology, and delivery, i.e., project management, are added to the mix. And if you’re in an ad agency, you also have media. (Harry Crane’s gotta go somewhere!)

As a creative, you must sell your work through a gauntlet of gatekeepers. Not only will your creative higher-ups approve the work—or at least give input—but so will all the other departments, including account. They’ll poke holes in your strategy and force you to consider the details. You’ll go back and iterate and do it all over again. By the time the client sees it, it’s pretty damn near perfect.

Back then, design agencies rarely had retainers and weren’t agencies of record like most advertising shops. The industry soon changed as the stability of being an AoR for a brand meant being able to hire dedicated teams. One hundred percent allocated creatives meant solutions improved through deeper familiarity with the client’s brand. The benefit of the perspective of the agency was still present because of the way they’re organized. Day-to-day designers, copywriters, art directors, project managers, and account managers are dedicated. But as you go up the hierarchy, creative directors, group creative directors, executive creative directors, and their departmental peers are on multiple accounts. They use this more “worldly” perspective to ensure their teams’ output is on trend, following industry best practices, and relevant. When I was GCD at LEVEL Studios, I oversaw design across many Silicon Valley enterprise brands simultaneously—Cisco, NetApp, VMware, and Marvell.

In-House: Go Deeper

Eventually, whether it’s because of age, maturity, wisdom, or just plain exhaustion, I realized agency life is a young person’s game. The familiarity of working on the same brand, talking to the same audience, and solving similar problems is comforting. I’m not alone, as so many friends have ended up at Salesforce, Apple, and Meta.

Agency life is about exploring different creative identities—just like dating. But in-house work lets you go deeper, building a shared creative language with a single partner: your brand.

While I worked for Apple and Pixar in-house for a few years, that was in the middle of my career. I’d soon return to agency life at Razorfish, PJA, and Rosetta. By the time I got to TrueCar, I had done and seen so much. It was easy for me to take on inforgraphics, pitch decks, publications, motion graphics, and more. I built a strong creative team of nine to take on nearly everything except for above-the-line advertising.

That’s not to say there’s nothing new to learn in a marriage—or working in-house. There’s a ton. But it requires the maturity to want play the long game.

It’s about building relationships and the buzzword I keep hearing these days—alignment. Alignment is about influence, selling your work, and building consensus. Instead of the gauntlet of creative gatekeepers I mentioned earlier, being in-house gives you more design and creative authority and ownership, as long as you can convince others of your expertise.

For me, I can. I’ve spent more than half my career in agencies and worked on dozens of brands across hundreds of projects. I’ve seen a lot and done a lot.

Many designers new to UX or product design rely on user research for many decisions. This is what is taught in schools and boot camps. It’s a best practice that should only be used when the answers aren’t obvious. I suppose obviousness is relative. More senior designers who’ve designed a lot will arrive at answers more quickly because they’ve solved similar problems or seen other apps solve similar problems. Velocity is paramount for startups. Testing something obvious, i.e., has been previously solved, slows the business down. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

From Boot Camps to Product Teams

I’m not quite sure what the state of the agency is today. I see a rise in boutique shops but also a consolidation in the large players. Omnicom and IPG have announced a $20 billion merger to compete against Publicis Groupe and WPP. A report from Forrester last year predicted that generative AI might eliminate as many as 30,000 jobs from ad agencies by 2030. So, what are the prospects for young designers who want to work at agencies first? I don’t know, but it might be much harder to get a job than when I was coming up.

Early-career designers can still get agency-like experience in startups or tech companies, where wearing multiple hats provides a crash course in breadth. They’ll have opportunities to level up quickly. But without mentors or structured guidance, the learning curve can be steep.

Breadth and Depth

While I might be stretching this metaphor of short-term versus long-term relationships a bit—and I do apologize—there are other ways of thinking about this. Medical students rotate through many different specialties to get a feel for which one they might want to focus on. Heck, I would argue it’s similar for undeclared college students as well.

There’s value in the shotgun approach when you’re early in your career. (Sorry for mixing my metaphors again!) In the early stages of your career, variety helps you explore. Later, you’ll face a choice: stick with variety or embrace stability. Not that there can’t be variety in being client-side. Of course, that can happen via different product lines, audiences, and even sub-brands. The sandbox will be just a little smaller.

Stephen Beck wasn’t questioning the value of agencies. He wondered why the New York Times would have an external one since they already have an internal one. Agencies give perspective, which you need for brand campaigns. It’s easy for in-house creatives to get sucked into the company’s mission and forget how the outside world sees them. Perspective through breadth is the currency of agencies. In contrast, you get more profound insights via depth by being in-house.

I believe working in both types of organizations is part of a designer’s journey. Dating teaches you breadth and adaptability, while commitment lets you dive deep and create lasting value. The key is knowing when it’s time to shift gears.