Everyone wants design, no one wants to pay for it
TL;DR : Look at the data. De-valuing designers like this won't end well.
I've been a dev & design hybrid for my entire career. And while I'll always be a designer at heart, I've stopped looking for design work. This post from Joey Politano shows why. We're all saying the design landscape has changed, but I don't think non-designers realize just how much. It's a bloodbath.
"Tools and tech change." Yes, we've always known that and adapted. But this is different.
There is a ravenous hunger for design in all things, tightly glued to a disdain for designers and an unwillingness to pay for design work. A paradoxical view that design is simultaneously arcane magic and a trivial layer of paint. The tech landscape wants designers to be cast out like witches, because we have machines to do the magic now. We used to pay heretical wizards for their secret knowledge, but now our robots can free us from their spells... right?
Except that the magical knowledge was neither magic nor secret. Quite the opposite. It was always wide open for anyone willing to learn. The bots are useful in many ways, but having a microwave does not itself make one a chef. When you've cut the human experience out of the equation of designing things for humans, it just becomes a race to the bottom. And when human labor is the most expensive component of any product, devaluing that and removing it altogether becomes an attractive goal.
I believe the current state of design will normalize or equalize at some point. Maybe that's just stubborn optimism on my part. The saturation of trash will get high enough that the value of real human-driven design will climb again. That's happening a bit now - really great design is valued as bespoke, while the window for slop and mediocrity has widened exponentially. The real question is going to be how long designers can hang on before the bubble pops, the dust settles, and the willingness to pay for design is more aligned with the appetite to consume it.
