For my series on the Design Talent Crisis (see Part I, Part II, and Part III) I interviewed five recent graduates from California College of the Arts (CCA) and San Diego City College. I’m an alum of CCA and I used to teach at SDCC. There’s a mix of folks from both the graphic design and interaction design disciplines. 

Meet the Grads

If these enthusiastic and immensely talented designers are available and you’re in a position to hire, please reach out to them!

Benedict Allen

Benedict Allen is a Los Angeles-based visual designer who specializes in creating compelling visual identities at the intersection of design, culture, and storytelling. With a strong background in apparel graphics and branding, Benedict brings experience from his freelance work for The Hunt and Company—designing for a major automotive YouTuber’s clothing line—and an internship at Pureboost Energy Drink Mix. He is skilled in a range of creative tools including Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, and AI image generation. Benedict’s approach is rooted in history and narrative, resulting in clever and resonant design solutions. He holds an Associate of Arts in Graphic Design from San Diego City College and has contributed to the design community through volunteer work with AIGA San Diego Tijuana.

• Portfolio
• LinkedIn

Emma Haines

Emma Haines is a UX and interaction designer with a background in computer science, currently completing her MDes in Interaction Design at California College of the Arts. She brings technical expertise and a passion for human-centered design to her work, with hands-on experience in integrating AI into both the design process and user-facing projects. Emma has held roles at Mphasis, Blink UX, and Colorado State University, and is now seeking full-time opportunities where she can apply her skills in UX, UI, or product design, particularly in collaborative, fast-paced environments.

• Portfolio
• LinkedIn

Erika Kim

Erika Kim is a passionate UI/UX and product designer based in Poway, California, with a strong foundation in both visual communication and thoughtful problem-solving. A recent graduate of San Diego City College’s Interaction & Graphic Design program, Erika has gained hands-on experience through internships at TritonNav, Four Fin Creative, and My Rental Spot, as well as a year at Apple in operations and customer service roles. Her work has earned her recognition, including a Gold Winner award at The One Club Student Awards for her project “Gatcha Eats.” Erika’s approach to design emphasizes clarity, collaboration, and the power of well-crafted wayfinding—a passion inspired by her fascination with city and airport signage. She is fluent in English and Korean, and is currently open to new opportunities in user experience and product design.

• Portfolio
• LinkedIn

Ashton Landis

Ashton Landis is a San Francisco-based graphic designer with a passion for branding, typography, and visual storytelling. A recent graduate of California College of the Arts with a BFA in Graphic Design and a minor in ecological practices, Ashton has developed expertise across branding, UI/UX, design strategy, environmental graphics, and more. She brings a people-centered approach to her work, drawing on her background in photography to create impactful and engaging design solutions. Ashton’s experience includes collaborating with Bay Area non-profits to build participatory identity systems and improve community engagement. She is now seeking new opportunities to grow and help brands make a meaningful impact.

• Portfolio
• LinkedIn

Leah Ray

Leah (Xiayi Lei) Ray is a Beijing-based visual designer currently working at Kuaishou Technology, with a strong background in impactful graphic design that blends logic and creativity. She holds an MFA in Design and Visual Communications from California College of the Arts, where she also contributed as a teaching assistant and poster designer. Leah’s experience spans freelance work in branding, identity, and book cover design, as well as roles in UI/UX and visual development at various companies. She is fluent in English and Mandarin, passionate about education, arts, and culture, and is recognized for her thoughtful, novel approach to design.

• Portfolio
• LinkedIn

Meet the Educators

Sean Bacon

Sean Bacon is a professor, passionate designer and obsessive typophile who teaches a wide range of classes at San Diego City College. He also helps direct and manage the graphic design program and its administrative responsibilities. He teaches a wide range of classes and always strives to bring excellence to his students’ work. He brings his wealth of experiences and insight to help produce many of the award winning portfolios from City. He has worked for The Daily Aztec, Jonathan Segal Architecture, Parallax Visual Communication and Silent Partner. He attended San Diego City College, San Diego State and completed his masters at Savannah College of Art and Design. 

Eric Heiman

Eric Heiman is principal and co-founder of the award-winning, oft-exhibited design studio Volume Inc. He also teaches at California College of the Arts (CCA) where he currently manages TBD*, a student-staffed design studio creating work to help local Bay Area nonprofits and civic institutions. Eric also writes about design every so often, has curated one film festival, occasionally podcasts about classic literature, and was recently made an AIGA Fellow for his contribution to raising the standards of excellence in practice and conduct within the Bay Area design community. 

Elena Pacenti

Elena Pacenti is a seasoned design expert with over thirty years of experience in design education, research, and international projects. Currently the Director of the MDes Interaction Design program at California College of the Arts, she has previously held leadership roles at NewSchool of Architecture & Design and Domus Academy, focusing on curriculum development, faculty management, and strategic planning. Elena holds a PhD in Industrial Design and a Master’s in Architecture from Politecnico di Milano, and is recognized for her expertise in service design, strategic design, and user experience. She is passionate about leading innovative, complex projects where design plays a central role.

Bradford Prairie

Bradford Prairie has been teaching at San Diego City College for nine years, starting as an adjunct instructor while simultaneously working as a professional designer and creative director at Ignyte, a leading branding agency. What made his transition unique was Ignyte’s support for his educational aspirations—they understood his desire to prioritize teaching and eventually move into it full-time. This dual background in industry and academia allows him to bring real-world expertise into the classroom while maintaining his creative practice.

Josh Silverman

For three decades, Josh Silverman has built bridges between entrepreneurship, design education, and designers—always focused on helping people find purpose and opportunity. As founder of PeopleWork Partners, he brings a humane design lens to recruiting and leadership coaching, placing emerging leaders at companies like Target, Netflix, and OpenAI, and advising design teams on critique, culture, and operations. He has chaired the MDes program at California College of the Arts, taught and spoken worldwide, and led AIGA chapters. Earlier, he founded Schwadesign, a lean, holacratic studio recognized by The Wall Street Journal and others. His clients span startups, global enterprises, top universities, cities, and non-profits. Josh is endlessly curious about how teams make decisions and what makes them thrive—and is always up for a long bike ride.

In Part I of this series, I wrote about the struggles recent grads have had finding entry-level design jobs and what might be causing the stranglehold on the design job market.

Part II: Building New Ladders

When I met Benedict Allen, he had just finished with Portfolio Review a week earlier. That’s the big show all the design students in the Graphic Design program at San Diego City College work toward. It’s a nice event that brings out the local design community where seasoned professionals review the portfolios of the graduating students.

Allen was all smiles and relief. “I want to dabble in different aspects of design because the principles are generally the same.” He goes on to mention how he wants to start a fashion brand someday, DJ, try 3D. “I just want to test and try things and just have fun! Of course, I’ll have my graphic design job, but I don’t want that to be the end. Like when the workday ends, that’s not the end of my creativity.” He was bursting with enthusiasm.

And confidence. When asked about how prepared he felt about his job prospects, he shares, “I say this humbly, I really do feel confident because I’m very proud of my portfolio and the things I’ve made, my design decisions, and my thought processes.” Oh to be in my early twenties again and have his same zeal!

But here’s the thing, I believe him. I believe he’ll go on to do great things because of this young person’s sheer will. He idolizes Virgil Abloh, the died-too-young multi-hyphenate creative who studied architecture, founded the fashion label Off-White, became artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, and designed furniture for IKEA and shoes for Nike. Abloh is Allen’s North Star. 

Artificial intelligence, despite its sycophantic tendencies, does not have that infectious passion. Young people are the life blood of companies. They can reinvigorate an organization and bring perspectives to a jaded workforce. Every single time I’ve ever had the privilege of working with interns, I have felt this. My teams have felt this. And they make the whole organization better.

What Companies Must Do

I love this quote by Robert F. Kennedy in his 1966 speech at the University of Cape Town:

This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.

As mentioned in Part I of this series, the design industry is experiencing an unprecedented talent crisis, with traditional entry-level career pathways rapidly eroding as the capabilities of AI expand and companies anticipate using AI to automate junior-level tasks. Youth is the key ingredient that sustains companies and industries.

The Business Case for Juniors

Five recent design graduates. From top left to right: Ashton Landis, Erika Kim, Emma Haines. Bottom row, left to right: Leah Ray, Benedict Allen.

Just as important as the energy and excitement Benedict Allen brings, is his natural ability to wield AI. He’s an AI native.

In my conversation with him, he’s tried all the major chatbots and has figured out what works best for what. “I’ve used Gemini as I find its voice feature amazing. Like, I use it all the time. …I use Claude sometimes for writing, but I find that the writing was not as good as ChatGPT. ChatGPT felt less like AI-speak. …I love Perplexity. That’s one of my favorites as well.”

He’s not alone. Leah Ray, who recently graduated from California College of the Arts with an MFA in Graphic Design, says that she can’t remember how her design process existed without AI, saying, “It’s become such an integral part of how I think and work.”

She parries with ChatGPT, using it as a creative partner:

I usually start by having a deep or sometimes extended conversation with ChatGPT. And it’s not about getting the direct answer, but more about using the dialogue to clarify my thoughts and challenging my assumptions and even arrive at a clear design direction.

She’ll go on and use the chatbot to help with project planning and timelines, copywriting, code generation, and basic image generation. Ray has even considered training her own AI model using tools like ComfyUI or LoRA that are based on her past design work. She says, “So it could assist me in generating proposals that match my visual styles.” Pretty advanced stuff.

Similar to Ray, Emma Haines, who is finishing up her MDes in Interaction Design at CCA, says that AI “comes into the picture very early on.” She’ll use ChatGPT for brainstorming and project planning, and less so in the later stages.

Unlike many established designers, these young ones don’t see AI as threatening, nor as a crutch. They treat AI as any other tool. Ashton Landis, who recently graduated from CCA with a BFA in Graphic Design, says, “I think right now it’s primarily a tool instead of a replacement.”

Elena Pacenti, Director of MDes Interaction Design at CCA, observes that students have embraced AI immediately and across the board. She says generative AI has been “adopted immediately by everyone, faculty and students” and it’s being used to create text, images, and all sorts of visual content—not just single images, but storyboards, videos, and more. It’s become just another tool in their toolkit.

Pacenti notices that her students are gravitating toward using AI for efficiency rather than exploration. She sees them “embracing all the tools that help make the process faster, more efficient, quicker” to get to their objective, rather than using AI “to explore things they haven’t thought about or to make things.” They’re using it as a shortcut rather than a creative partner. 

Restructure Entry-Level Roles

I don’t think it’s quite there yet, but AI will eventually take over the traditional tasks we give to junior designers. Anthropic recently released an integration with Canva, but the results are predictable—barely a good first draft. For companies that choose to live on the bleeding edge, that will likely be within 12 months. I think in two years, we’ll cede more and more of these junior-level design tasks like extending designs, resizing assets, and searching for stock to AI.

But I believe there is still a place for entry-level designers in any organization. 

Firstly, the tasks can simply be done faster. When we talk about AI and automation, oftentimes the human who’s initiating the task and then judging its output isn’t part of the conversation. Babysitting AI takes time and more importantly, breaks flow. I can imagine teaching a junior designer how to perform these tasks using AI and just stack up more in a day or week. They’ll still be able to practice their taste and curation skills with supervision from more senior peers.

Second, younger people are inherently better with newer technologies. Asking a much more senior designer to figure out advanced prototyping with Lovable or Cursor will be a non-starter. But junior designers should be able to pick this up quickly and become indispensable pairs of hands in the overall process.

Third, we can simply level up the complexity of the tasks we give to juniors. Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, wrote in The New York Times:

Unless employers want to find themselves without enough people to fill leadership posts down the road, they need to continue to hire young workers. But they need to redesign entry-level jobs that give workers higher-level tasks that add value beyond what can be produced by A.I. At the accounting and consulting firm KPMG, recent graduates are now handling tax assignments that used to be reserved for employees with three or more years of experience, thanks to A.I. tools. And at Macfarlanes, early-career lawyers are now tasked with interpreting complex contracts that once fell to their more seasoned colleagues. Research from the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management backs up this switch, indicating that new and low-skilled workers see the biggest productivity gains and benefits from working alongside A.I. tools.

In other words, let’s assume AI will tackle the campaign resizing or building out secondary and tertiary pages for a website. Have junior designers work on smaller projects as the primary designer so they can set strategy, and have them shadow more senior designers and develop their skills in concept, strategy, and decision-making, not just execution.

Invest in the Leadership Pipeline

The 2023 Writers Guild of America strike offers a sobering preview of what could happen to the design profession if we’re not careful about how AI reshapes entry-level opportunities. Unrelated to AI, but to simple budget-cutting, Hollywood studios began releasing writers immediately after scripts were completed, cutting them out of the production process where they would traditionally learn the hands-on skills needed to become showrunners and producers. As Oscar-winning writer Sian Heder (CODA) observed, “A writer friend has been in four different writers rooms and never once set foot on set. How are we training the next generation of producers and showrunners?” The result was a generation of writers missing the apprenticeship pathway that transforms scriptwriters into skilled creative leaders—exactly the kind of institutional knowledge loss that weakens an entire industry.

The WGA’s successful push for guaranteed on-set presence reveals what the design industry must do to avoid a similar talent catastrophe. Companies are avoiding junior hires entirely, anticipating that AI will handle execution tasks—but this eliminates the apprenticeship pathway where designers actually learn strategic thinking. Instead, they need to restructure entry-level roles to guarantee meaningful learning opportunities—pairing junior designers with real projects where they develop taste through guided decision-making. As one WGA member put it, “There’s just no way to learn to do this without learning on the job.” The design industry’s version of that job isn’t Figma execution—it’s the messy, collaborative process of translating business needs into human experiences. 

Today’s junior designers will become tomorrow’s creative directors, design directors, and heads of design. Senior folks like myself will eventually age out, so companies that don’t invest in junior talent now won’t have any experienced designers in five to ten years. 

And if this is an industry-wide trend, young designers who can’t get into the workforce today will pivot to other careers and we won’t have senior designers, period.

How Education is Responding

Our five design educators. From top left to right: Bradford Prairie, Elena Pacenti, Sean Bacon. Bottom row, left to right: Josh Silverman, Eric Heiman.

The Irreplaceable Human Element

When I spoke to the recent grads, all five of them mentioned how AI-created output just has an air of AI. Emma Haines:

People can tell what AI design looks like versus what human design looks like. I think that’s because we naturally just add soul into things when we design. We add our own experiences into our designs. And just being artists, we add that human element into it. I think people gravitate towards that naturally, just as humans.

It speaks to how educators are teaching—and have always been teaching—design. Bradford Prairie, a professor at San Diego City College:

We always tell students, “Try to expose yourself to a lot of great work. Try to look at a lot of inspiration. Try to just get outside more.” Because I think a lot of our students are introverts. They want to sit in their room and I tell them, “No, y’all have to get out in the world! …and go touch grass and touch other things out in the world. That’s how you learn what works and what doesn’t, and what culture looks like.

Leah Ray, explaining how our humanity imbues quality into our designs:

You can often recognize an AI look. Images and designs start to feel like templates and over-predictable in that sense. And everything becomes fast like fast food and sometimes even quicker than eating instant food.

And even though there is a scary trend towards synthetic user research, Elena Pacenti, discourages it. She’ll teach her students to start with provisional user archetypes using AI, but then they’ll need to perform primary research to validate it. “We’re going to do primary to validate. Please do not fake data through the AI.”

Redefining Entry-Level Value

I only talked to educators from two institutions for this series, since those are the two I have connections to. For both programs, there’s less emphasis on hard skills like how to use Figma and more on critical thinking and strategy. I suspect that bootcamps are different.

Sean Bacon, chair of the Graphic Design program at San Diego City College:

Our program is really about concepting, creative thinking, and strategy. Bradford and I are cautiously optimistic that maybe, luckily, the chips we put down, are in the right part of the board. But who knows?

I think he’s spot on. Josh Silverman, who teaches courses at CCA’s MDes Interaction Design, and also a design recruiter, observes: 

So what I’m seeing from my perspective is a lot of organizations that are hiring the kind of students that we graduate from the program, what I like to call a “dangerous generalist.” It’s someone who can do the research, strategy, prototyping, visual design, presentation, storytelling, and be a leader and make a measurable impact. And if a company is restructuring or just starting and only has the means to hire one person, they’re going to want someone who can do all those things. So we are poised to help a lot of students get meaningful employment because they can do all those things.

AI as Design Material, Not Just Tool

Much of the AI conversation has been about how to incorporate it into our design workflows. For UX designers, it’s just as important to discuss how we design AI experiences for users.

Elena Pacenti champions this shift in the conversation. “My take on the whole thing has been to move beyond the tools and to understand AI as a material we design with.” Similar to the early days of virtual reality, AI is an interaction paradigm with very few UI conventions and therefore ripe for designers to invent. Right now.

This profession specifically designs the interaction for complex systems, products, services, a combination—whatever it is out there—and ecosystems of technologies. What’s the next generation of these things that we’re going to design for? …There’s a very challenging task of imagining interactions that are not going just through a chatbot, but they don’t have shape yet. They look tremendously immaterial, more than the past. It’s not going to be necessarily through a screen.

Her program at CCA has implemented this through a specific elective called “Prototyping with AI,” which Pacenti describes as teaching students to “get your hands dirty and understand what’s behind the LLMs and how you can use this base of data and intelligence to do things that you want, not that they want.” The goal is to help students craft their own tools rather than just using prepackaged consumer AI tools—which she calls “a shift towards using it as a material.”

The Path Forward Requires Collective Action

Benedict Allen’s infectious enthusiasm after Portfolio Review represents everything the design industry risks losing if we don’t act deliberately. His confidence, creativity, and natural fluency with AI tools? That’s the potential young designers bring—but only if companies and educational institutions create pathways for that talent to flourish.

The solution isn’t choosing between human creativity and artificial intelligence. It’s recognizing that the combination is more powerful than either alone. Elena Pacenti’s insight about understanding “AI as a material we design with” points toward this synthesis, while companies like KPMG and Macfarlanes demonstrate how entry-level roles can evolve rather than disappear.

This transformation demands intentional investment from both sides. Design schools are adapting quickly—reimagining curriculum, teaching AI fluency alongside fundamental design thinking, emphasizing the irreplaceable human elements that no algorithm can replicate. Companies must match this effort. Restructure entry-level roles. Create new apprenticeship models. Recognize that today’s junior designers will become tomorrow’s creative leaders.

The young designers I profiled here prove that talent and enthusiasm haven’t disappeared. They’re evolving. Allen’s ambitious vision to start a fashion brand. Leah Ray’s ease with AI tools. The question isn’t whether these designers can adapt to an AI-enabled future.

It’s whether the industry will create space for them to shape it.

In the final part of this series, I’ll explore specific strategies for recent graduates navigating this current job market—from building AI-integrated portfolios to creating alternative pathways into the profession.

This is the first part in a three-part series about the design talent crisis. Read Part II and Part III.

Part I: The Vanishing Bottom Rung

Erika Kim’s path to UX design represents a familiar pandemic-era pivot story, yet one that reveals deeper currents about creative work and economic necessity. Armed with a 2020 film and photography degree from UC Riverside, she found herself working gig photography—graduations, band events—when the creative industries collapsed. The work satisfied her artistic impulses but left her craving what she calls “structure and stability,” leading her to UX design. The field struck her as an ideal synthesis, “I’m creating solutions for companies. I’m working with them to figure out what they want, and then taking that creative input and trying to make something that works best for them.”

Since graduating from the interaction design program at San Diego City College a year ago, she’s had three internships and works retail part-time to pay the bills. “I’ve been in survival mode,” she admits. On paper, she’s a great candidate for any junior position. Speaking with her reveals a very thoughtful and resourceful young designer. Why hasn’t she been able to land a full-time job? What’s going on in the design job market? 

Back in January, Jared Spool offered an explanation. The UX job market crisis stems from a fundamental shift that occurred around late 2022—what he calls a “market inversion.” The market flipped from having far more open UX positions than qualified candidates to having far more unemployed UX professionals than available jobs. The reasons are multitude, but include expiring tax incentives, rising interest rates, an abundance of bootcamp graduates, automated hiring processes, and globalization.

But that’s only part of the equation. I believe there’s something much larger at play, one that affects more than just UX or product design, but all design disciplines. One in which the tip of the spear has already been felt by software developers in their job market. AI.

Closing Doors for New Graduates

In the first half of this year, 147 tech companies have laid off over 63,000 workers, with a significant portion of them engineers. Entry-level hiring has collapsed, revealing a new permanent reality. At Big Tech companies, new graduates now represent just 7% of all hires—a precipitous 25% decline from 2023 levels and a staggering 50% drop from pre-pandemic baselines in 2019.

The startup ecosystem tells an even more troubling story, where recent graduates comprise less than 6% of new hires, down 11% year-over-year and more than 30% since 2019. This isn’t merely a temporary adjustment; it represents a fundamental restructuring of how companies approach talent acquisition. Even the most credentialed computer science graduates from top-tier programs are finding themselves shut out, suggesting that the erosion of junior positions cuts across disciplines and skill levels.  

LinkedIn executive Aneesh Raman wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that in a “recent survey of over 3,000 executives on LinkedIn at the vice president level or higher, 63 percent agreed that A.I. will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees.”

There is already a harsh reality for entry-level tech workers. Companies have essentially frozen junior engineer and data analyst hiring because AI can now handle the routine coding and data querying tasks that were once the realm for new graduates. Hiring managers expect AI’s coding capabilities to expand rapidly, potentially eliminating entry-level roles within a year, while simultaneously increasing demand for senior engineers who can review and improve AI-generated code. It’s a brutal catch-22: junior staff lose their traditional stepping stones into the industry just as employers become less willing to invest in onboarding them. 

For design students and recent graduates, this data illuminates a broader industry transformation where companies are increasingly prioritizing proven experience over potential—a shift that challenges the very foundations of how creative careers traditionally begin.

While AI tools haven’t exactly been able to replace designers yet—even junior ones—the tech will get there sooner than we think. And CEOs and those holding the purse strings are anticipating this, thus holding back hiring of juniors.

Five recent design graduates. From top left to right: Ashton Landis, Erika Kim, Emma Haines. Bottom row, left to right: Leah Ray, Benedict Allen.

The Learning-by-Doing Crisis

Ashton Landis recently graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts (full disclosure: my alma mater). She says:

I found that if you look on LinkedIn for “graphic designer” and you just say the whole San Francisco Bay area, so all of those cities, and you filter for internships and entry level as the job type, there are 36 [job postings] total. And when you go through it, 16 of them are for one or more years of experience. And five of those are for one to two years of experience. And then everything else is two plus years of experience, which doesn’t actually sound like sound like entry level to me. …So we’re pretty slim pickings right now.

When I graduated from CCA in 1995 (or CCAC as it was known back then), we were just climbing out of the labor effects of the early 1990s recession. For my early design jobs in San Francisco, I did a lot of production and worked very closely with more senior designers and creative directors to hone my craft. While school is great for academic learning, nothing beats real-world experience.

Eric Heiman, creative director and co-owner of Volume Inc., a small design studio based in San Francisco, has been teaching at CCA for 26 years. He observes:

We internalize so much by doing things slower, right? The repetition of the process, learning through tinkering with our process, and making mistakes, and things like that. We have internalized those skills.

Sean Bacon, chair of the Graphic Design program at San Diego City College wonders:

What is an entry level position in design then? Where do those exist? How often have I had these companies hire my students even though they clearly don’t have those requirements. So I don’t know. I don’t know what happens, but it is scary to think we’re losing out on what I thought was really valuable training in terms of how I learned to operate, at least in a studio.

Back to the beginnings of my career, I remember digitizing logos when I interned with Mark Fox, a talented logo designer based in Marin County. A brilliant draftsman, he had inked—and still inks—all of his logos by hand. The act of redrawing marks in Illustrator helped me develop my sense of proportions, curves, and optical alignment. At digital agencies, I started my journey redesigning layouts of banners in different sizes. I would eventually have juniors to do that for me as I rose through the ranks. These experiences—though a little painful at the time—were pivotal in perfecting our collective craft. To echo Bacon, it was “really valuable training.”

Apprenticeships at Agencies

Working in agencies and design studios was pretty much an apprenticeship model. Junior designers shadowed more senior designers and took their lead when executing a campaign or designing more pages for a website.

For a typical website project, as a senior designer or art director, I would design the homepage and a few other critical screens, setting up the look and feel. Once those were approved by the client, junior designers would take over and execute the rest. This was efficient and allowed the younger staff to participate and put their reps in.

Searching for stock photos was another classic assignment for interns and junior designers. These were oftentimes multi-day assignments, but it helped teach juniors how to see. 

But today, generative AI apps like Midjourney and Visual Electric are replacing stock photography. 

From Craft to Curation

As the industry marches towards incorporating AI into our workflows, strategy, judgement, and most importantly taste, are critical skills.

But the paradoxically, how do designers develop taste, craft, and strategic thinking without doing the grunt work?

And not only are they missing out on the mundane work because of the dearth of entry-level opportunities, but also because generative AI can give results so quickly.

Eric Heiman again:

I just give the AI a few words and poof, it’s there. How do you learn how to see things? I just feel like learning how to see is a lot about slowing down. And in the case of designers, doing things yourself over and over again, and they slowly reveal themselves through that process.

Navigating the New Reality

All the recent graduates I interviewed for this piece are smart, enthusiastic, and talented. Yet, Ashton Landis and Erika Kim are struggling to find full-time jobs. 

Landis doesn’t think her negative experience in the job market is “entirely because of AI,” attributing it more to “general unemployment rates are pretty high right now” and a job market that is “clearly not great.”

Questioning Career Choices

Leah Ray, a recent graphic design MFA graduate from CCA, was able to secure a position as International Visual Designer at Kuaishou, a popular Chinese short-form video and live-streaming app similar to TikTok. But it wasn’t easy. Her job search began months before graduation, extending through her thesis work and creating the kind of sustained anxiety that prompted her final school project—a speculative design exploring AI’s potential to predict alternative career futures.

I was so anxious about my next step after graduation because I didn’t have a job lined up and I didn’t know what to do. …I’m a person who follows the social clock. My parents and the people around me expect me to do the right thing at the right age. Getting a nice job was my next step, but I couldn’t finish that, which led to me feeling anxious and not knowing what to do.

But through her tenacity and some luck, she was able to land the job that she starts this month. 

No, it was not easy to find. But finding this was very lucky. I do remember I saw a lot of job descriptions for junior designers. They expect designers to have AI skills. And I think there are even some roles specifically created for people with AI-related design skills, like AI motion designer and AI model designer, sort of something like that. Like AI image training designers.

Ray’s observation reveals a fundamental shift in entry-level design expectations, where AI proficiency has moved from optional to essential, with entirely new roles emerging around AI-specific design skills.

Our five design educators. From top left to right: Bradford Prairie, Elena Pacenti, Sean Bacon. Bottom row, left to right: Josh Silverman, Eric Heiman.

Preparing Our Students

Emma Haines, a designer completing her masters degree in Interaction Design at CCA began her job search in May. (Her program concludes in August.) Despite not securing a job yet, she’s bullish because of the prestige and practicality of the Master of Design program.

I think this program has actually helped me a good amount from where I was starting out before. I worked for a year between undergrad and this program, and between where I was before and now, there’s a huge difference. That being said, since the industry is changing so rapidly, it feels a little hard to catch up with. That’s the part that makes me a little nervous going into it. I could be confident right now, but maybe in six months something changes and I’m not as confident going into the job market.

CCA’s one-year program represents a strategic bet on adaptability over specialization. Elena Pacenti, the program’s director, describes an intensive structure that “goes from a foundational semester with foundation of interaction design, form, communication, and research to the system part of it. So we do systems thinking, prototyping, also tangible computing.” The program’s Social Lab component is “two semester-long projects with community partners in partnership with stakeholders that are local or international from UNICEF down to the food bank in Oakland.” It positions design as a tool for social impact rather than purely commercial purposes. This compressed timeline creates what Pacenti calls curricular agility: “We’re lucky that we are very agile. We are a one-year program so we can implement changes pretty quickly without affecting years of classes and changes in the curriculum.”

Josh Silverman, who chaired it for nearly five years, reports impressive historical outcomes: “I think historically for the first nine years of the program—this is cohort 10—I think we’ve had something like 85% job placement within six months of graduation.”

Yet both educators acknowledge current market realities. Pacenti observes that “that fat and hungry market of UX designers is no longer there; it’s on a diet,” while maintaining optimism about design’s future relevance: “I do not believe that designers will be less in demand. I think there will be a tremendous need for designers.” Emma Haines’s nervousness about rapid industry change reflects this broader tension—the gap between educational preparation and market evolution that defines professional training during transformative periods.

Bradford Prairie, who has taught in San Diego City College’s Graphic Design program for nine years, embodies this experimental approach to AI in design education. “We get an easy out when it comes to AI tools,” he explains, “because we’re a program that’s meant to train people for the field. And if the field is embracing these tools, we have an obligation to make students aware of them and give some training on how to use the tools.”

Prairie’s classroom experiments reveal both the promise and pitfalls of AI-assisted design. He describes a student struggling with a logo for a DJ app who turned to ChatGPT for inspiration: “It generates a lot of expected things like turntables, headphones, and waveforms… they’re all too complicated. They all don’t really look like logos. They look more like illustrations.” But the process sparked some other ideas, so he told the student, “This is kind of interesting how the waveform is part of the turntable and… we can take this general idea and redraw it and make it simplified.”

This tension between AI output and human refinement has become central to his teaching philosophy: “If there’s one thing that AI can’t replace, it’s your sense of discernment for what is good and what is not good.” The challenge, he acknowledges, lies in developing that discernment in students who may be tempted to rely too heavily on AI from the start.

The Turning Point

These challenges are real, and they’re reshaping the design profession in fundamental ways. Traditional apprenticeships are vanishing, entry-level opportunities are scarce, and new graduates face an increasingly competitive landscape. But within this disruption lies opportunity. The same forces that have eliminated routine design tasks have also elevated the importance of uniquely human skills—strategic thinking, cultural understanding, and creative problem-solving. The path forward requires both acknowledging what’s been lost and embracing what’s possible.

Despite her struggles to land a full-time job in design, Erika Kim remains optimistic because she’s so enthused about her career choice and the opportunity ahead. Remarking on the parallels of today versus the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, she says “It’s kind of interesting that I’m also on completely different grounds in terms of uncertainty. But you just have to get through it, you know. Why not?”

In the next part of this series, I’ll focus on the opportunities ahead: how we as a design industry can do better and what we should be teaching our design students. In the final part, I’ll touch on what recent grads can do to find a job in this current market.

There has been an explosion of AI-powered prompt-to-code tools within the last year. The space began with full-on integrated development environments (IDEs) like Cursor and Windsurf. These enabled developers to use leverage AI assistants right inside their coding apps. Then came a tools like v0, Lovable, and Replit, where users could prompt screens into existence at first, and before long, entire applications.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to test out as many of these tools as I could. My aim was to find the app that would combine AI assistance, design capabilities, and the ability to use an organization’s coded design system.

While my previous essay was about the future of product design, this article will dive deep into a head-to-head between all eight apps that I tried. I recorded the screen as I did my testing, so I’ve put together a video as well, in case you didn’t want to read this.

It is a long video, but there’s a lot to go through. It’s also my first video on YouTube, so this is an experiment.

The Bottom Line: What the Testing Revealed

I won’t bury the lede here. AI tools can be frustrating because they are probabilistic. One hour they can solve an issue quickly and efficiently, while the next they can spin on a problem and make you want to pull your hair out. Part of this is the LLM—and they all use some combo of the major LLMs. The other part is the tool itself for not handling what happens when their LLMs fail. 

For example, this morning I re-evaluated Lovable and Bolt because they’ve released new features within the last week, and I thought it would only be fair to assess the latest version. But both performed worse than in my initial testing two weeks ago. In fact, I tried Bolt twice this morning with the same prompt because the first attempt netted a blank preview. Unfortunately, the second attempt also resulted in a blank screen and then I ran out of credits. 🤷‍♂️

For designers who want actual design tools to work on UI, Subframe is the clear winner. The other tools go directly from prompt to code, skipping giving designers any control via a visual editor. We’re not developers, so manipulating the design in code is not for us. We need to be able to directly manipulate the components by clicking and modifying shapes on the canvas or changing values in an inspector.

For me, the runner-up is v0, if you want to use it only for prototyping and for getting ideas. It’s quick—the UI is mostly unstyled, so it doesn’t get in the way of communicating the UX.

The Players: Code-Only vs. Design-Forward Tools

There are two main categories of contenders: code-only tools, and code plus design tools.

Code-Only

• Bolt
• Lovable
• Polymet
• Replit
• v0

Code + Design

• Onlook
• Subframe
• Tempo

My Testing Approach: Same Prompt, Different Results

As mentioned at the top, I tested these tools between April 16–27, 2025. As with most SaaS products, I’m sure things change daily, so this report captures a moment in time.

For my evaluation, since all these tools allow for generating a design from a prompt, that’s where I started. Here’s my prompt:

Create a complete shopping cart checkout experience for an online clothing retailer

I would expect the following pages to be generated:

• Shopping cart
• Checkout page (or pages) to capture payment and shipping information
• Confirmation

I scored each app based on the following rubric:

• Sample generation quality
• User experience (25)
• Visual design (15)
• Prototype (10)
• Ease of use (15)
• Control (15)
• Design system integration (10)
• Speed (10)
• Editor’s discretion (±10)

The Scoreboard: How Each Tool Stacked Up

Final summary scores for AI design tools for designers. Evaluations conducted between 4/16–4/27/25.

Here are the summary scores for all eight tools. For the detailed breakdown of scores, view the scorecards here in this Google Sheet.

The Blow-by-Blow: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Bolt

First up, Bolt. Classic prompt-to-code pattern here—text box, type your prompt, watch it work. 

Bolt shows you the code generation in real-time, which is fascinating if you’re a developer but mostly noise if you’re not. The resulting design was decent but plain, with typical UX patterns. It missed delivering the confirmation page I would expect. And when I tried to re-evaluate it this morning with their new features? Complete failure—blank preview screens until I ran out of credits. No rhyme or reason. And there it is—a perfect example of the maddening inconsistency these tools deliver. Working beautifully in one session, completely broken in another. Same inputs, wildly different outputs.

Score: 43

Lovable

Moving on to Lovable, which I captured this morning right after they launched their 2.0 version. The experience was a mixed bag. While it generated clean (if plain) UI with some nice touches like toast notifications and a sidebar shopping cart, it got stuck at a critical juncture—the actual checkout. I had to coax it along, asking specifically for the shopping cart that was missing from the initial generation.

The tool encountered an error but at least provided a handy “Try to fix” button. Unlike Bolt, Lovable tries to hide the code, focusing instead on the browser preview—which as a designer, I appreciate. When it finally worked, I got a very vanilla but clean checkout flow and even the confirmation page I was looking for. Not groundbreaking, but functional. The approach of hiding code complexity might appeal to designers who don’t want to wade through development details.

Score: 49

Polymet

Next up is Polymet. This one has a very interesting interface and I kind of like it. You have your chat on the left and a canvas on the right. But instead of just showing the screen it’s working on, it’s actually creating individual components that later get combined into pages. It’s almost like building Figma components and then combining them at the end, except these are all coded components.

The design is pretty good—plain but very clean. I feel like it’s got a little more character than some of the others. What’s nice is you can go into focus mode and actually play with the prototype. I was able to navigate from the shopping cart through checkout (including Apple Pay) to confirmation. To export the code, you need to be on a paid plan, but the free trial gives you at least a taste of what it can do.

Score: 58

Replit

Replit was a test of patience—no exaggeration, it was the slowest tool of the bunch at 20 minutes to generate anything substantial. Why so slow? It kept encountering errors and falling into those weird loops that LLMs often do when they get stuck. At one point, I had to explicitly ask it to “make it work” just to progress beyond showing product pages, which wasn’t even what I’d asked for in the first place.

When it finally did generate a checkout experience, the design was nothing to write home about. Lines in the stepper weren’t aligning properly, there were random broken elements, and ultimately—it just didn’t work. I couldn’t even complete the checkout flow, which was the whole point of the exercise. I stopped recording at that point because, frankly, I just didn’t want to keep fighting with a tool that’s both slow and ineffective. 

Score: 31

v0

Taking v0 for a spin next, which comes from Vercel. I think it was one of the earlier prompt-to-code generators I heard about—originally just for components, not full pages (though I could be wrong). The interface is similar to Bolt with a chat panel on the left and code on the right. As it works, it shows you the generated code in real-time, which I appreciate. It’s pretty mature and works really well.

The result almost looks like a wireframe, but the visual design has a bit more personality than Bolt’s version, even though it’s using the unstyled shadcn components. It includes form validation (which I checked), and handles the payment flow smoothly before showing a decent confirmation page. Speed-wise, v0 is impressively quick compared to some others I tested—definitely a plus when you’re iterating on designs and trying to quickly get ideas.

Score: 61

Onlook

Onlook stands out as a self-contained desktop app rather than a web tool like the others. The experience starts the same way—prompt in, wait, then boom—but instead of showing you immediate results, it drops you into a canvas view with multiple windows displaying localhost:3000, which is your computer running a web server locally. The design it generated was fairly typical and straightforward, properly capturing the shopping cart, shipping, payment, and confirmation screens I would expect. You can zoom out to see a canvas-style overview and manipulate layers, with a styles tab that lets you inspect and edit elements.

The dealbreaker? Everything gets generated as a single page application, making it frustratingly difficult to locate and edit specific states like shipping or payment. I couldn’t find these states visually or directly in the pages panel—they might’ve been buried somewhere in the layers, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. When I tried using it again today to capture the styles functionality for the video, I hit the same wall that plagued several other tools I tested—blank previews and errors. Despite going back and forth with the AI, I couldn’t get it running again.

Score: 71

Subframe

My time with Subframe revealed a tool that takes a different approach to the same checkout prompt. Unlike most competitors, Subframe can’t create an entire flow at once (though I hear they’re working on multi-page capabilities). But honestly, I kind of like this limitation—it forces you as a designer to actually think through the process.

What sets Subframe apart is its MidJourney-like approach, offering four different design options that gradually come into focus. These aren’t just static mockups but fully coded, interactive pages you can preview in miniature. After selecting a shopping cart design, I simply asked it to create the next page, and it intelligently moved to shipping/billing info.

The real magic is having actual design tools—layers panel, property inspector, direct manipulation—alongside the ability to see the working React code. For designers who want control beyond just accepting whatever the AI spits out, Subframe delivers the best combination of AI generation and familiar design tooling.

Score: 79

Tempo

Lastly, Tempo. This one takes a different approach than most other tools. It starts by generating a PRD from your prompt, then creates a user flow diagram before coding the actual screens—mimicking the steps real product teams would take. Within minutes, it had generated all the different pages for my shopping cart checkout experience. That’s impressive speed, but from a design standpoint, it’s just fine. The visual design ends up being fairly plain, and the prototype had some UX issues—the payment card change was hard to notice, and the “Place order” action didn’t properly lead to a confirmation screen even though it existed in the flow.

The biggest disappointment was with Tempo’s supposed differentiator. Their DOM inspector theoretically allows you to manipulate components directly on canvas like you would in Figma—exactly what designers need. But I couldn’t get it to work no matter how hard I tried. I even came back days later to try again with a different project and reached out to their support team, but after a brief exchange—crickets. Without this feature functioning, Tempo becomes just another prompt-to-code tool rather than something truly designed for visual designers who want to manipulate components directly. Not great.

Score: 59

The Verdict: Control Beats Code Every Time

Subframe offers actual design tools—layers panel, property inspector, direct manipulation—along with AI chat.

I’ve spent the last couple weeks testing these prompt-to-code tools, and if there’s one thing that’s crystal clear, it’s this: for designers who want actual design control rather than just code manipulation, Subframe is the standout winner.

I will caveat that I didn’t do a deep dive into every single tool. I played with them at a cursory level, giving each a fair shot with the same prompt. What I found was a mix of promising starts and frustrating dead ends.

The reality of AI tools is their probabilistic nature. Sometimes they’ll solve problems easily, and then at other times they’ll spectacularly fail. I experienced this firsthand when retesting both Lovable and Bolt with their latest features—both performed worse than in my initial testing just two weeks ago. Blank screens. Error messages. No rhyme or reason.

For designers like me, the dealbreaker with most of these tools is being forced to manipulate designs through code rather than through familiar design interfaces. We need to be able to directly manipulate components by clicking and modifying shapes on the canvas or changing values in an inspector. That’s where Subframe delivers while others fall short—if their audience includes designers, which might not be the case.

For us designers, I believe Subframe could be the answer. But I’m also looking forward to if Figma will have an answer. Will the company get in the AI > design > code game? Or will it be left behind? 

The future belongs to applications that balance AI assistance with familiar design tooling—not just code generators with pretty previews.

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.

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.