Andy Budd argues that AI tools have hurt mid-level designers more than juniors or seniors, because a few years of experience plus a good AI workflow now matches what used to take a decade to build. He frames this as the real casualty of the AI shift in design careers.
I have this really terrible joke. Like, how many designers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Well, first, we need to do a six-month study in the role of light in society. This is how often, or this is how a lot of our business partners see. They just say, hey, look, the light bulb's broken. Can you fit a light bulb? And us designers are going, hey, you know, we've seen conversations with Johnny Ives. We're like, you know, like, hey, maybe the real question isn't like a light bulb. Maybe it's a form of light creation or the ability to see in the dark. And like, hey, if we step back, maybe it's not a light bulb, it's a candle. Maybe it's a spotlight. Maybe it's something that we've never even dreamed of before. And from a design perspective, that's wonderful. And the product manager is like, I just need the light to be turned on because it's dark and we need to get our work done. And so it's this tension that I see that is constantly frustrating. So yeah, it's this lash of cultures. And a lot of my coaching work is trying to help design leaders navigate through those challenges. But yeah, I do think the AI gives designers the opportunity not only to argue for a course of action, but to actually launch it and see whether it works. You know, again, I'm bouncing around a lot of design law here, but I love Doug Bowman, amazing guy, used to work at Google. He was asked by the Google. Engineers to multivariate test the color of a link. And the law goes that he was so frustrated by how engineering-driven the Google mindset was. He thought it was a ridiculous thing that you would have to try 50 different versions of the color blue, you know, to just believe in the design authority and it doesn't matter. And so he handed his notice in and left. That's the law. I'm sure there's a lot more to it. And then obviously a few months later, the Google engineers came back and said, well, actually, we tested it. And there was a 0.1% difference between this blue and this blue. But for a company that sees a billion users a year a day, actually, that made a statistically valid choice that meant we had, I don't know, I'm making up the number, 50 million more clicks on this link than we had before. And so it's that tension there that I think makes it really difficult, which is also why I think a lot of designers are moving to doing their own thing. Because if you're doing your own thing, you get to make the choices. You know, you can choose whether you want to multivariate and test 50 versions of blue, or you can choose that you just want to go with your gut because this is what you want to do. A lot of the designers building their own thing, it's giving them a level of agency, which they haven't had for years. You know, for the last 10 years, like I say, they've been told what to build, they've been told how to build it, they've been told when to deliver it. And that can be really agency sapping. Whereas now, if you want to go out and use Claude Code to build your own little small app or your small business, it's delightful because no one's telling you what to do. So I'm seeing a whole generation of designers falling back in love again with the act of making and building and shipping because they are the ones that are in charge of doing that. And it's really, really great. And it feels really freeing. So I think that's an interesting trend.
In both your bull and bear scenarios, it seems like the winners, if there is such a thing, are more senior designers or senior leads that it doesn't seem to allow for too much space for junior designers, except maybe when it comes to entrepreneurship, because they don't have, they don't have that innate product sense that's been built up for years. How, how do you address that?
Yeah, I don't know. Again, I can't remember the name of the title, but I wrote an article about this similar thing a while ago. So when the AI boom started, I thought it was going to destroy foundational jobs, early jobs. And I thought that this would be good for senior people, engineers, and designers, until those senior people retire and there are no more senior people. Because if you don't have a pipeline of junior people, they never become mid-level, they never become senior. I think the article was about mangrove forests, which are where the little tiny fish go and hide from the big predators and they grow and they get bigger and then they move to the coral reefs. And so I think my thinking was that this would be really problematic. And I think there is some evidence that people are now in certain roles, you know, let's say law, rather than hiring a bunch of junior legal secretaries or associates to go through all of the case law where you learn the ins and outs, you're now using AI to do that. And so I think there are certain there are certain industries where that entry-level role has been cut out and diminished. Weirdly though, I think in the engineering world, particularly, maybe design world as well, it's actually the mid-level people that I think have been hit the worst because a lot of the mid-level people, you know, they are maybe, you know, not the best designers in their team. Maybe they're mid-level manager. Maybe they're not designing anymore. You know, they're managing a team of five people, but it's not that hard managing a team of five people. And so, you know, a lot of those mid-level people are being cut out. And actually, the people they're managing, they've maybe two, three years worth of experience in their career. You put two or three year experience designer next to a bunch of foundation models and they can actually start shipping designs that are maybe equivalent of the mid-level designer, but at 30, 40% of the cost. And so I actually think it's the mid-level people that are being eaten up at the moment. These are the ones that haven't engaged with AI yet, or they have, but they're just a junior with a really good AI stack is indistinguishable from a mid-level person with a really good AI stack. And so you ditch the people in the middle. The other thing that I think is happening is that basically, whenever there's a pivot, the things that you knew that made you mid-level aren't relevant anymore, or many of them aren't. In the early days of the web, A lot of a lot of traditional print designers moved over to being web designers. And sure, their knowledge of typography was really important. Their knowledge of color theory was really important. But they often struggled with the imprecise nature of the layout, the fact that it would look different on different browsers, the fact that the screen would move and we'd have these flexible systems, the fact that you didn't have this at all. And so you were looking at these print designers and thinking, well, actually, you've got 10 years worth of print experience, but 70% of what you've learned is now no longer relevant. And the 30% that you have learned is really useful, but you can actually learn that 30% really quickly. You can get, you know, a book on typography. You can get a book on color theory as a junior. And so there was a time, you know, when probably me and you started where like I was a terrible designer, but I knew enough about it to be able to do as good enough design as a really good print person who was transitioning into being a web designer. And so I think this is where we are with juniors. Like I'm meeting a lot of younger designers who are two, three, four years in their career who are arguably like AI native, who are knowing how to use the tools, knowing how to use a tech stack, are not afraid to get their hands dirty. They're not afraid about titles or UX. They don't care if they're called a UX designer or a design engineer or any of that stuff. They're just getting stuck in shipping. And actually they're shipping really, really good work at a lower cost than someone who is maybe should have 10 years more experience. And so I think that is what's happened. I think the middle, like a badly racy flee, the middle of the design market has dropped. Again, a lot of the people I know, a lot of my friends, a lot of people I'm coaching are that kind of mid-level of designer that are either going, shit, I need to go back to being a practitioner. I've been a design leader for the last five years. I haven't shipped. I need to become a player coach. My Figma skills are now irrelevant. I need to go back and I need to retrain. I need to get better at these AI tools because I need to, very least, I need to manage these people and know what they're talking about. And more likely, my product manager doesn't want a leader. They want someone that can ship. And so I need to be able to ship like the best of them. And so I think the whole nature and makeup of the industry's change, not necessarily because of AI, but I think AI has accelerated that.
What do you think in these scenarios happens to? I mean, we've been talking about what happens to people inside product orgs. What happens to the design industry? I mean, as a thing, is it a collapse? Because there's conferences, there's coaches, there's educators, there's a whole group of people that are part of the industry that this is going to affect them. If suddenly there's 50% less designers, that's a big impact.
It is. It's almost like Thanos has come and clicked his fingers and half of, you know, potentially half of the design world. Yeah. Who knows? I honestly don't know. I say that the bull case is its peak designer is 95%. That's entirely possible. There are plenty of people out there that will look back at past technical innovations and say, every time a new technical innovation has come along, everyone said that jobs are going to be destroyed. And some jobs have been destroyed, but that technology also creates a whole bunch of new jobs. And for some people, maybe they're early to middle of their career, they are around and are flexible enough where they can pivot into from the old role to the new role. And there are maybe some people who are slightly longer in their tooth that don't want to pivot and they will maybe age out. And so there might be a simple transition. There aren't too many people who are doing lead-based typography anymore. You know, there was a time when a newspaper had to have people doing the design using layout. Some of them moved to desktop publishing. Some of them retired. Don't now, you know, some people take it up as a hobby. You know, there literally is, there's a really old heritage press in the town next to me. There's a 300-year-old metal type press. And people do it for fun. They let oppress posters because it's fun. So maybe that's where we've been moving. A lot of people will transition into something new. Maybe everyone will become a design engineer. What happens next? I think there'll be a bunch of boutique designers just love doing it. You know, I know a bunch of people that were heads of design at big tech companies. They've made their money. They run a little design studio, not because they need to pay the bills because they've got their mortgage paid off or whatever, because they love doing design and it becomes almost being a carpenter or running a little thrift shop. You're not doing it because you make a lot of money. You're just doing it for the love of it. And so that's one future. It might be that the amount of design that's needed is infinitely increased. It might be the same way at the moment. Engineers are not being made redundant. There's more desire for engineers with AI skills than ever before. So there's a possibility it might uptick. And there's a possibility in Mandantic. There's a possibility that this is different. The model I use is most of these sort of technical innovations, we have given up a lower level human skill for high level human skill. It used to be that you would use physical labor to pump water and then you attach a horse to the pump or you attach a steam engine to the pump and now you no longer need to use physical labor. So you can use, you know, you move to using IQ and intelligence. And then you maybe sit in a room full of people calculating things and then a spreadsheet comes along and now you don't need this room full of calculators. But then maybe you're using creativity. And for the last, you know, the last 20 years, we've been knowledge workers. We have been using our knowledge built up over 20, 30 years to deliver work. I think AI is a great knowledge work killer because how can you compete against a machine that has the whole sum total of human knowledge? But maybe we're moving away from knowledge work towards judgment work, which is another word for taste. And so if these systems are still spitting stuff out, there might be need for people that have got judgment and taste to guide what gets built and how we build it and all that kind of stuff. And so I think those senior people will actually move more into a product leadership equal, less hands-on, more coordinating, more orchestrating. But I do think there is a world where 90% of design is automated. Now, there's one thing, again, because I'm not putting any value judgment here. If you are a young designer, this is quite scary. But if you're a young solicitor, this is quite scary. If you're a young engineer, this is quite scary. If you're young anything at the moment, it's quite scary. It's really hard to know where the job market will go. I think the skills I'd be teaching my students aren't particular design skills, but the ability to learn, which is arguably what university was always meant to be. I think we're moving into a world where you will probably have to change your career every six or seven or eight years. Not change your job or change your role, but change your career. And so I think if you are somebody that loves new technology, loves to learn, is incredibly flexible, you might start down a design career path now. And it might, as we know it, it might last for five, six, seven, eight years. And then something else will come along and you will pivot. And that might be a different form of design or it might be something else entirely. Or you might choose to open, you know, become a plumber or open a cafe or a bike repair shop or whatever. I'm increasingly meeting people that literally, I had my house painted a couple of weeks ago. There's a guy in the street painting a house. I was like, do you do this? He's like, yeah, I used to be a marketer, but there's no work for marketers anymore. So now I paint houses. I was like, oh, well, come and paint my house. Maybe we're all going to be painting houses in the future. I don't know.
Well, that seems like a good place to end this. Oh, a terrifying place
