Haiyan Zhang gives us another way of thinking about AI—as material, like clay, paint, or plywood—instead of a tool. I like that because it invites exploration:

When we treat AI as a design material, prototyping becomes less about refining known ideas — and more about expanding the space of what’s possible. It’s messy, surprising, sometimes frustrating — but that’s what working with any material feels like in its early days.

Clay resists. Wood splinters. AI misinterprets.

But in that material friction, design happens.

The challenge ahead isn’t just to use AI more efficiently — it’s to foster a culture of design experimentation around it. Like any great material, AI won’t reveal its potential through control, but through play, feedback, and iteration.

I love this metaphor. It’s freeing.

Jay Hoffman, from his excellent The History of the Web site:

1995 is a fascinating year. It’s one of the most turbulent in modern history. 1995 was the web’s single most important inflection point. A fact that becomes most apparent by simply looking at the numbers. At the end of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. 12 months later, there were almost 75,000. By the end of 1995, over 700 new servers were being added to the web every single day.

That was surely a crazy time…

Elizabeth Goodspeed, writing for It’s Nice That:

The cynicism our current moment inspires appears to be, regrettably, universal. For millennials, who watched the better-world-by-design ship go down in real time, it’s hard-earned. We saw the idealist fantasy of creative autonomy, social impact, and purpose-driven work slowly unravel over the past decade, and are now left holding the bag. Gen Z designers have the same pessimism, but arrived at it from a different angle. They’re entering the field already skeptical, shaped by a job market in freefall and constant warnings of their own obsolescence. But the result is the same: an industry full of people who care deeply, but feel let down.

Sounds very similar to what Gen X-ers are facing in their careers too. I think it’s universal for nearly all creative careers today.

Travis Bumgarner:

The people of Mexico, without asking anybody, chose bright colors to paint their houses. I fell in love. Every time I pass by a colorful house, I feel inspired.

It’s color palettes based on random houses in Mexico.

As a longtime Apple fanboy, it’s a little hard for me to appreciate the visual design of Windows—Microsoft is a nemesis, if you will. But I will tip my hat to the design practitioners there who’ve made the company finally pay attention to design.

Side note, reminds me of a story about what Steve Jobs once told me when I was designing the welcome animation for Mac OS X.

Sarah Gibbons and Evan Sunwall from NN/g:

The rise of AI tools doesn’t mean becoming a “unicorn” who can do everything perfectly. Specialization will remain valuable in our field: there will still be dedicated researchers, content strategists, and designers.

However, AI is broadening the scope of what any individual can accomplish, regardless of their specific expertise.

What we’re seeing isn’t the elimination of specialization but rather an increased value placed on expanding the top of a professional’s “expertise T.”

This reinforces what I talked about in a previous essay, “T-shaped skills [will become] increasingly valuable—depth in one area with breadth across others.”

They go on to say:

We believe these broad skills will coalesce into experience designer and architect roles: people who direct AI-supported design tasks to craft experiences for humans and AI agents alike, while ensuring that the resulting work reflects well-researched, strategic thinking.

In other words, curation of the work that AI does.

They also make the point that designers need to be strategic, i.e., focus on the why:

This evolution means that the unique value we bring as UX professionals is shifting decidedly toward strategic thinking and leadership. While AI can execute tasks, it cannot independently understand the complex human and organizational contexts in which our work exists.

Finally, Gibbons and Sunwall end with some solid advice:

To adapt to this shift toward generalist skills, UX professionals should focus on 4 key areas: • Developing a learning mindset • Becoming fluent in AI collaboration • Focusing on transferable skills • Expanding into adjacent fields

I appreciate the learning mindset bit, since that’s how I’m wired. I also believe that collaborating with AI is the way to go, rather than seeing it as a replacement or a threat.

Related to the NYT article about Gen X-ers in creative industries that I posted yesterday, graphic design historian Steven Heller explores what happened with advertising—specifically print—creative in the 2000s.

Advertising did not change when the Times Square ball fell at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, but the industry began its creative decline in the early 2000s. Here are several indicators to support this claim: For one, the traditional print outlets for advertisements, notably magazines and newspapers, sharply declined in numbers (some turning to digital-only) during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Major advertisers were cutting print budgets and earmarking creative talent for television work. TV had already plucked away many of the most imaginative ad-people during the preceding decades, and print slipped lower down on the hierarchical ladder.

He continues:

The work of 1960s and 1970s “mad men” smothered conventional establishment agencies at Art Directors Club award competitions, spawning the innovative Big Idea creative dynamic where exceptional art directors and copywriters made witty, ironic and suggestive slogans and visuals. But, by the early 2000s, these teams started to cede their dominance with, among the other social factors, the death of many national print magazines and the failure of television networks to retain large audiences in the face of cable.

In my first couple of years in design school, I was enamored with advertising. It seemed so glamorous to be making ads that appeared in glossy magazines and on TV. I remember visiting the offices of an agency in San Francisco—the name escapes me—and just loving the vibe and the potential. After graduation and into my career, I would brush up against ad agencies, collaborating with them on the pieces my design company was working on. Sometimes it was with FCB on Levi’s retail work, or BBDO for Mitsubishi Motors digital campaigns. I ended up working for a small ad agency in 2010, PJA Advertising & Marketing, doing B2B ads. It was fun and I learned a lot, but it wasn’t glamorous.

Anyway, back to Heller’s article…it’s reinforcing the idea that our—potentially Boomers, Gen Xers, and even Millennials—mental model of the creative and media world must change due to reality. And we must pivot our careers or be left behind.

Steven Kurtz, writing for The New York Times:

For many of the Gen X-ers who embarked on creative careers in the years after [Douglas Coupland’s Generation X] was published, lessness has come to define their professional lives.

If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.

My first assumption was that Kurtz was writing about AI and how it’s taking away all the creative jobs. Instead, he weaves together a multifactorial illustration about the diminishing value of commercial creative endeavors like photography, music, filmmaking, copywriting, and design.

“My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s,” Mr. Wilcha said. “The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it’s just gone. It’s startling.”

Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.

It’s more than AI, although certainly, that is top of everyone’s mind these days. Instead, it’s also stock photography and illustrations, graphic templates, the consolidation of ad agencies, the revolutionary rise of social media, and the tragic fall of traditional media.

Similar shifts have taken place in music, television and film. Software like Pro Tools has reduced the need for audio engineers and dedicated recording studios; A.I., some fear, may soon take the place of actual musicians. Streaming platforms typically order fewer episodes per season than the networks did in the heyday of “Friends” and “ER.” Big studios have slashed budgets, making life for production crews more financially precarious.

Earlier this year, I cited Baldur Bjarnason’s essay about the changing economics of web development. As an opening analogy, he referenced the shifting landscape of film and television.

Born in 1973, I am squarely in Generation X. I started my career in the design and marketing industry just as the internet was taking off. So I know exactly what the interviewees of Kurtz’s article are facing. But by dogged tenacity and sheer luck, I’ve been able to pivot and survive. Am I still a graphic designer like I was back in the mid-1990s? Nope. I’m more of a product designer now, which didn’t exist 30 years ago, and which is a subtle but distinct shift from UX designer, which has existed for about 20 years.

I’ve been lucky enough to ride the wave with the times, always remembering my core purpose.

Such a gorgeous visual essay from Amelia Wattenberger. Beyond being wonderful to look at, the content is just as thought-provoking. Her experiment towards the middle of the piece is interesting. In our world of flat design and design systems, Amelia is truly innovating.