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.

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.

My wife and I are big movie lovers. Every year, between January and March, we race to see all the Oscar-nominated films. We watched A Complete Unknown last night and The Brutalist a couple of weeks ago. The latter far outshines the former as a movie, but both share a common theme: the creative obsession.

Timothée Chalamet, as Bob Dylan, is up at all hours writing songs. Sometimes he rushes into his apartment, stumbling over furniture, holding onto an idea in his head, hoping it won’t flitter away, and frantically writes it down. Adrien Brody, playing a visionary architect named László Tóth, paces compulsively around the construction site of his latest project, ensuring everything is built to perfection. He even admonishes and tries to fire a young worker who’s just goofing off.

There is an all-consuming something that takes over your thoughts and actions when you’re in the groove willing something to life, whether it’s a song, building, design, or program. I’ve been feeling this way lately with a side project I’ve been working on off-hours—a web application that’s been consuming my thoughts for about a week. A lot of this obsession is a tenacity around solving a problem. For me, it has been fixing bugs in code—using Cursor AI. But in the past, it has been figuring out how to combine two disparate ideas into a succinct logo, or working out a user flow. These ideas come at all hours. Often for me it’s in the shower but sometimes right before going to sleep. Sometimes my brain works on a solution while I sleep, and I wake up with a revelation about a problem that seemed insurmountable the night before. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

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.

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.

I love this essay from Baldur Bjarnason, maybe because his stream of consciousness style is so similar to my own. He compares the rapidly changing economics of web and software development to the film, TV, and publishing industries.

Before we get to web dev, let's look at the film industry, as disrupted by streaming.

Like, Crazy Rich Asians made a ton of money in 2018. Old Hollywood would have churned out at least two sequels by now and it would have inspired at least a couple of imitator films. But if they ever do a sequel it’s now going to be at least seven or even eight years after the fact. That means that, in terms of the cultural zeitgeist, they are effectively starting from scratch and the movie is unlikely to succeed.

He's not wrong.

Every Predator movie after the first has underperformed, yet they keep making more of them. Completed movies are shelved for tax credits. Entire shows are disappeared [from] streamers and not made available anywhere to save money on residuals, which does not make any sense because the economics of Blu-Ray are still quite good even with lower overall sales and distribution than DVD. If you have a completed series or movie, with existing 4K masters, then you’re unlikely to lose money on a Blu-Ray.

I'll quibble with him here. Shows and movies disappear from streamers because there's a finite pot of money from subscriber revenue. So removing content will save them money. Blu-Ray is more sustainable because it's an additional purchase.

OK, let's get back to web dev.

He points out that similar to the film and other creative industries, developers fill their spare time with passion projects. But their day jobs are with tech companies and essentially subsidize their side projects.

And now, both the creative industries proper and tech companies have decided that, no, they probably don’t need that many of the “grunts” on the ground doing the actual work. They can use “AI” at a much lower cost because the output of the “AI” is not that much worse than the incredibly shitty degraded products they’ve been destroying their industries with over the past decade or so.

Bjarnason ends with seven suggestions for those in the industry. I'll just quote one:

Don’t get tied to a single platform for distribution or promotion. Every use of a silo should push those interested to a venue you control such as a newsletter or website.

In other words, whatever you do, own your audience. Don't farm that out to a platform like X/Twitter, Threads, or TikTok.

Of course, there are a lot of parallels to be drawn between what's happening in the development and software engineering industries to what's happening in design.

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.

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.”

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.