Design's obituary has been written more times than I can count these past few months, depending which newsletter you subscribe to. My notes go back further than that, starting with what I actually heard from my own team:
"So I needed to summarise my research findings and Chat did it in like 23 seconds..."
"That developer really pissed me off, so I built it myself, AND IT ACTUALLY WORKS"
"I needed three prototype variations done yesterday, so I got Figma Make to do its magic ASAP"
In our workplace, they started introducing internal LLMs and tools for our everyday work, and pushing us to use AI everywhere. It felt a little funny at first. I started noticing it online too, that same low hum of pressure, like if you weren't using AI for absolutely everything, you were already behind.
One day, a product manager had sent me a mock of an "interestingly vibe coded" layout that had already been approved by senior stakeholders. I was a little annoyed, but laughed it off, and had a pretty direct conversation about why I wasn't going to go ahead with this approach, it wasn't accessible and didn't meet our design system requirements.
Buzzwords were flooding my socials (agentic, vibe coding, hallucinations), our tech standups became somewhat comical trying to keep up with every acronym under the sun, and then the headlines caught up too, big tech companies cutting jobs and pointing straight at AI investment as the reason why. That added its own kind of pressure, watching the same investment I was being told to get excited about used as the reason for cuts. It made me wonder what the hell was happening.
So whilst reading a few Substack articles and browsing YouTube, I came across this video:
"This design process that designers have been taught, we sort of treat it as gospel. That's basically dead."
Jenny Wen
What struck me wasn't the headline, "design is dead" clickbait is everywhere at this point, it was the reasoning underneath it. Wen wasn't saying design didn't matter anymore. She was saying that the traditional design process, the one everyone had been taught to follow without question, doesn't survive contact with teams that can now ship in hours instead of months. That distinction sat with me for a few days after I watched it.
One afternoon when I was scrolling Instagram, a Figma post made me stop and actually read it. As I struggled to read the inaccessible copy, I went deep into the comments, everyone had an opinion, and I got completely wrapped up in it.
One comment stuck with me the most:
_detachinstance: Figma eulogizing design's resilience while being one of the primary instruments of its systematization. It's a little like a fast food company running ads about the joy of home cooking. The future of design isn't components, it's curiosity and creativity.
I agreed with it completely. Figma mourning design's death while also being one of the reasons it keeps getting flattened into templates and components, one new feature release at a time, felt exactly right. It got me thinking.
This is what I came up with:
Design isn't dead. The traditional design process is.
That's the tea right there. And the confusing part is that there has been A LOT of change in a very short span of time. Jenny Wen put words to something I couldn't quite articulate myself, that this shift isn't really coming from us. It's engineering that changed first, and design is just catching up to keep pace with it.
How we work has changed. Drastically.
We are now shifting from static deliverables and classic Figma prototypes (the kind that would take you hours down a YouTube rabbit hole just to get one motion bit right) to rapid prototyping and engineering done within a 30 second prompt.
The old design discovery cycle is becoming obsolete. We're no longer creating and iterating in that same slow back-and-forth.
Wen talks about design splitting into two modes now: polishing what engineers have already built, and setting a much shorter vision than we used to, months instead of years, just enough to keep everyone pointed the same way.
There are too many tools, use them wisely.
Every week Figma is releasing a new feature, design influencers are endlessly promoting some new product, each one promising it can build your entire design system in a single click. Half of them are genuinely useful. Half of them I've forgotten about by the following Monday.
So in short, try out what interests you, keep what earns its place, and don't feel guilty about ditching the rest.
Anyone can design now, but not everyone can call themselves a designer.
Even though your mate from product had a really good feature that they vibe coded, that doesn't mean their idea is going to replace the whole creative process. But learning how to design well still takes time, and practice, and iteration. I don't think we should go and burn our degrees or qualifications in protest.
Vibe coding can get you a good-looking feature. That's not the same as being able to call yourself a designer, and I don't think it ever will be.
Creativity isn't obsolete. Linear thinking is.
It's just changing, evolving, you can approach a problem in so many different ways now. Maybe that's the actual upside in all of this: not that AI hands you the answer, but that it hands you so many half-formed ones that you're forced to think sideways to pick the right one.
A living eulogy, I guess.
If this is a eulogy, or an obituary, or whatever we're calling it at this point, it's for the wrong thing either way. Design was never what was dying, it's just the process that's changed, the one we used to treat like gospel. It was something we were all used to, that's all.
I think what's actually scaring people is how fast it's happening, that constant loop of information overload and that sucky sense of being left behind if you don't keep up. But it's exciting too. Change is inevitable in every industry, and right now, we're the ones feeling it.