Product design is going to change profoundly within the next 24 months. If the AI 2027 report is any indication, the capabilities of the foundational models will grow exponentially, and with them—I believe—will the abilities of design tools.

The TL;DR of the report is this: companies like OpenAI have more advanced AI agent models that are building the next-generation models. Once those are built, the previous generation is tested for safety and released to the public. And the cycle continues. Currently, and for the next year or two, these companies are focusing their advanced models on creating superhuman coders. This compounds and will result in artificial general intelligence, or AGI, within the next five years. 

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.

In a recent podcast with partners at startup incubator Y Combinator, Jared Friedman, citing statistics from a survey with their current batch of founders says, “[The] crazy thing is one quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated, which is like an insane statistic. And it’s not like we funded a bunch of non-technical founders. Like every one of these people is highly tactical, completely capable of building their own product from scratch a year ago…”

A comment they shared from founder Leo Paz reads, “I think the role of Software Engineer will transition to Product Engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as codegen tools make everyone a 10x engineer.”

While vibe coding—the new term coined by Andrej Karpathy about coding by directing AI—is about leveraging AI for programming, it’s a window into what will happen to the software development lifecycle as a whole and how all the disciplines, including product management and design will be affected.

A tall man with curly, graying hair and a bushy mustache sits across from a woman with a very slight smile in a dimly lit room. There’s pleasant, calming music playing. He’s eager with anticipation to learn about his Outie. He’s an Innie who works on the “severed” floor at Lumon. He’s undergone a surgical procedure that splits his work self from his personal self. This is the premise of the show Severance on Apple TV+.

Ms. Casey, the therapist:

I’ve had Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography website/ebook bookmarked since I discovered it over ten years ago. It’s making the rounds again, and I think it’s a good reminder that we are all “professional writers” as he describes:

When we think of “professional writers” we probably think of novelists, screenwriters, or journalists. But the programmer, the scientist, the lawyer—and you, if your work depends on presenting written ideas—all deserve to be called professional writers.

But as professional writers, we do more than write. We edit, we format, we print, we generate PDFs, we make web pages. More than ever, we’re responsible for delivering the written word to our readers. So we’re not just writers—we’re publishers.

Typography is the visual component of the written word. Thus, being a publisher of the written word necessarily means being a typographer.

He’s right. As much of our work is in producing documents and content, we are publishers. Here are a few of my favorite pages:

• Straight and curly quotes (I have a similar post from 2009)
• One space between sentences
• Em sizing

This book reminds me of a couple of seminal books from the early 1990s: The Mac Is Not a Typewriter by Robin Williams and Stop Stealing Sheep by Erik Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger. The former is how I learned all the basics, back when I was designing my high school’s newspaper. The latter is more comprehensive, going deeper into how type works conceptually. These three are all essential resources for any designer.

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.

I’ve always been a maker at heart—someone who loves to bring ideas to life. When AI exploded, I saw a chance to create something new and meaningful for solo designers. But making Griffin AI was only half the battle…

Birth of an Idea

About a year ago, a few months after GPT-4 was released and took the world by storm, I worked on several AI features at Convex. One was a straightforward email drafting feature but with a twist. We incorporated details we knew about the sender—such as their role and offering—and the email recipient, as well as their role plus info about their company’s industry. To accomplish this, I combined some prompt engineering and data from our data providers, shaping the responses we got from GPT-4.

Playing with this new technology was incredibly fun and eye-opening. And that gave me an idea. Foundational large language models (LLMs) aren’t great yet for factual data retrieval and analysis. But they’re pretty decent at creativity. No, GPT, Claude, or Gemini couldn’t write an Oscar-winning screenplay or win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but it’s not bad for starter ideas that are good enough for specific use cases. Hold that thought.

Let me tell you a story…

Imagine a smoky wood-paneled conference room. Five men in smart suits sit around a table with a slide projector in the middle. Atop the machine is a finned plastic container that looks like a donut or a bundt cake. A sixth man is standing and begins a pitch.

Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on the level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.
My first job, I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter—Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new.” Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.
But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

Designing since 1985

I’ve been a designer for as long as I can remember. I usually like to say that I started in the seventh grade, after being tenacious enough to badger my father into buying my first Macintosh computer and then spending hours noodling in MacPaint and MacDraw. Pixel by pixel, I painstakingly drew Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, for a book report cover. I observed the lines of the parabolic exterior of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, known colloquially in San Francisco as “the washing machine,” and replicated them in MacDraw. Of course, that’s not design, but that was the start of my use of the computer to make visuals that communicate. Needless to say, I didn’t know what brand strategy even was, or why it’s important, but we’ll get there.

I recently came across Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by former software engineer Ken Kocienda. It was in one of my social media feeds, and since I’m interested in Apple, the creative process, and having been at Apple at that time, I was curious.

I began reading the book Saturday evening and finished it Tuesday morning. It was an easy read, as I was already familiar with many of the players mentioned and nearly all the technologies and concepts. But, I’d done something I hadn’t done in a long time—I devoured the book.

Ultimately this book gave more color and structure to what I’d already known, based on my time at Apple and my own interactions with him. Steve Jobs was the ultimate creative director who could inspire, choose, and direct work. 

Kocienda describes a nondescript conference room called Diplomacy in Infinite Loop 1 (IL1), the first building at Apple’s then main campus. This was the setting for an hours-long meeting where Steve held court with his lieutenants. Their team members would wait nervously outside the room and get called in one by one to show their in-progress work. In Kocienda’s case, he describes a scene where he showed Steve the iPad software keyboard for the first time. He presented one solution that allowed the user to choose from two layouts: more keys but smaller keys or fewer keys but bigger. Steve asked which Kocienda liked better, and he said the bigger keys, and that was decided.