Is design dead in the age of AI?

No, but it’s undergoing a revision

Photography by &Walsh

In a brightly colored studio overlooking a city skyline, a woman, with short dark hair and wearing a lime green dress and matching lime green shoes, sits on the edge of a white desk surrounded by books, plants, a camera, and colorful furnishings. Floor-to-ceiling windows behind her frame a blue sky filled with white clouds.

My take? The anxiety we all have is actually proof of something. You don’t dread losing something you don’t care about. The fact that this threatens us means we give real pieces of ourselves to this work. Time, taste, our particular way of seeing, and that craft you’ve built over years, is uniquely yours. The dread is pointing directly at the thing AI can’t replace.

We’re being buried right now in competent work. AI-generated output is already everywhere: fine but frictionless. Without a genuinely creative human behind it, the results often have no soul. There’s a reason a hand-lettered sign stops us on the street when a printed one, while more technically advanced, often does not. The evidence of a human being—their decisions, their idiosyncrasies, the tiny ways they deviate from perfect—carries information we’re wired to receive. It says: “Someone was here, someone cared, someone put love into this.” That signal is not going away. In a world flooded with AI output, results that signal human love and fingerprints will get louder. Scarcity does that. So does authenticity.

The history of design is the history of surviving tools.

Offset printing was supposed to kill typography. Desktop publishing was supposed to kill art direction. The Internet was supposed to kill print. What actually happened, each time, was that technology took over the mechanical parts, and what was left standing was the stuff that actually mattered. Your voice. Your sensibility. The specific ways you see the world, and the years it took to learn how to show it. We’re in one of those moments again. It’s uncomfortable. But if you let it, it’s also the thing that forces you to figure out what you actually stand for.

My tips for navigating this?

Develop something genuinely yours.

Not a style borrowed from a reference folder, but a point of view that came from living your actual life and paying attention to it. What do you notice that others don’t? What problems make you angry? What beauty makes you stop? Follow those threads. For me, that’s been an obsession with the emotional register of design—the way color, form, and type can make someone feel seen before they’ve read a single word. When we designed the identity for the video game Zooba, we weren’t just building a visual system. We were trying to bottle the specific warmth and chaos and joy of Cairo street food culture. No brief can fully contain that, and no prompt can generate it.

Go deeper into craft, not away from it.

The designers most exposed are those who were always assembling from templates, chasing trends, producing work that was a little generic. The ones who flourish will be those who know why a choice works. Study your medium. Learn its history. Know its principles well enough to break them intentionally. Embrace craft, whether it’s digital or physical or mixing mediums in unique ways never seen before.

Lean into imperfection.

When we were designing Meraki for our type foundry, Type of Feeling, our finishing partner said certain letterforms weren’t “drawn correctly.” Their version was more technically correct but less soulful. I pushed back. Those quirks are what give it character. AI does not fail interestingly; it fails blandly. Human designers fail in ways that sometimes become the whole point. Imperfections that still read as beautiful, signal that this was made by a human.

Let your influences be weird and wide.

The designers hardest to imitate are the ones whose references come from unexpected places. I find inspiration almost entirely outside of design: psychology, film, fashion, art. An unusual visual and cultural diet produces an unusual point of view. Stop scrolling Instagram and go live a little. Look at things others aren’t seeing.

Build real relationships, not just a portfolio.

People hire who they trust, especially for work that requires taste and judgment. The more AI can produce the generic version of something, the more clients need someone they actually believe for the version that matters.

Lean into taste and ideas.

Taste is knowing what’s good and what’s not and being willing to fight for the difference. AI can generate a hundred ideas in seconds, but most of them are mediocre. The tool doesn’t know that. You do. The designer who can look at a hundred options and know which one is worth pursuing, who can walk into a room and reframe what the client truly needs or wants, that person is not replaceable by any tool. AI just does what you tell it to. It can’t tell you thata what you’re asking is the wrong question to begin with, and human creatives who can master this will be in high demand.

So, is design dead in the age of AI?

Parts of it are. The routine parts, the assembly, the parts that were always production work dressed up as creativity… those are already going away. For many that means real loss and grief, and that’s worth naming.

But the designers themselves? No. Of all the people navigating this disruption—the accountants, the lawyers, the coders, the analysts—creatives might actually be the best equipped to survive it. Not because we’re immune, but because disruption is somehow a part of our routine. We’ve always worked in uncertainty. Made something from nothing. Found a new angle when the old one closed off. Each new brief gives new challenges and constraints to work within. Every dead end is an invitation to reframe.

The dread is real. The grief is real. And underneath both is the thing AI can’t replace: you, and everything you care about. Lean into that.