On being a designer in the most interesting, exhausting moment of our careers

I have an interesting POV as someone who has a design background but also coded a decent amount in the 2000s into the 2010s. I and some partners created our own PHP-driven CMS when we were not happy with WordPress and how most clients needed to edit pages, not blog posts. I still code, but much less, and more presentational (HTML/CSS).

That is to say I am not scared of code. Much talk of “vibe-coding” doesn’t scare me. In fact, knowing what I know about code and its digital accessibility pitfalls makes me well-suited for code-first design. I could bypass what does scare me: Javascript frameworks and dev-talk like state management. I should be excited for the skills I have and the way the tools have evolved.

And in some ways I am. To be able to design in code, to actually use the medium as it is, and not rely on an abstraction is a potentially great thing. Instead of using Figma or Illustrator or Photoshop (gasp!) we can use the actual code it will all be rendered in. That is indeed exciting.

But I’ve had mixed results when designing code-first. The code is limiting by nature. Its brittle. Choosing a way to execute an idea within the guardrails of code limits the ideas. I never get the same creative, coherent, and smoothly designed results when I start with code as when I start with an abstraction layer.

Can AI tools collapse this gap? Will wrangling what amounts to be an eager but not-completely experienced engineer take time and creativity away from the project, or will it free me to think in prototypes, not final production-level code?

Another article talked about using AI as a context layer, a way to keep all the context of a project in working memory. A way to keep in memory the decisions you have made along the way. In that way, AI could be very useful for creative work. It could track how taste for a particular project or brand has developed over time, and why.

This article captures our moment in time very well and compares it to the desktop publishing revolution of the 90s. Without intending it, I believe, the author uses our collective exhaustion as a filter. A way to slow down and absorb more slowly so we can take the best parts and apply them while ignoring the rest. That may be the way we survive.

What keeps coming back to me is how the designers who saw desktop publishing and said over my dead body did not get to define what followed. Those who remained curious, slightly weary, refusing to compromise their expectations but equally refusing to hold on to outdated ones, are who we remember.