Dear Designer,

I am still sitting heavily with my last two posts. They came in quick and dare I say, rapid fire, succession. The first was an immodest prediction about the future state of design and extrapolates where designers might sit or stand in that future. The second was a more longitudinal exploration of what might happen to design and digital tools and systems when traditional user experience gets replaced by agentic systems and oral inputs replacing visual and manual ones.

Both pieces leave me feeling a bit badly. I stand 100% behind the prognoses. And, while my feelings and fears these days may stir from the lizard brain of millennia past, those posts are honest if a bit hyperbolic. But more importantly, they come from a place of caring — for the design profession to which I have dedicated most of my career through teaching, volunteering, mentoring, writing, and running a studio and agency. They also come from a place of compassion and concern for designers, the artists of the everyday and the truck drivers of the culture industry.

No one knows where all of this automation and machine outsourcing goes — predictions about economic collapse, social upheaval, and human extinction have befuddled us for centuries; scary scenarios and frightening stories are, after all, probably 10% of the new and old testaments and they certainly make up a lot of the German children’s stories I read as a kid.

While my thinking may come across as pessimistic about design and scornful about our digital overlords, I’m not despondent. I am coming to this work not from a place of optimism but of idealism about what the future holds for us, dear designer. There are many sunny possibilities for every kind of design, even and despite the rise of commoditization and AI co-creation, and I think it’s important for designers to explore new and old ideas and possibilities as they prepare for change.

I offer up below a few recommendations or ways of thinking about your own path as a designer or creative individual. (And after this post, I’m going to do my best to focus on other things that are a bit more concrete — wellness over worry, typography over turpitude, mystery over mayhem, and tools over technology.)

Invest in yourself

I’ve mentioned this before but it was the best advice my accountant could have ever given me twenty years ago. Designers and knowledge workers all over the world are thinking about this great acceleration in which AI is turning a corner at breakneck speed with us HODL in the back of the car. It’s not fun or funny to be whipsawed and to feel like we have no control except to “master the AI tools.” Yes, mastering the AI tools is fine. Yes, you should probably spend some time creating a website or digital app using AI. Yes, you might explore what AI can and cannot do based on your own interests, needs, and ideas.

But fully embracing AI as a way of doing design, thinking about design, creating imagery, or building skills is also and absolutely the wrong way to go. There are no long-term “skills” for you to master with these consumer-level AI tools currently available. Seriously, what are you going to do? Become an expert vibe designer until the next release makes the prompts you learned obsolete? Sure, create something useful or interesting for yourself — a little todo app, a cool CRM, a financial dashboard, etc. But when the advice from Silicon Valley is to “learn how to vibe code” in order to be prepared, you know they are simply buying themselves time. A decade ago, we were told to “learn how to code” and that advice should have also fallen on deaf ears.

Instead, we designers should be going backwards in skills development and knowledge acquisition. Read actual books about design. Old books about art and design history. Learn how to typeset an article and then publish it someplace. Design a font. Create a site dedicated to your sideline. Take photos. Draw. Paint. Write. These are not merely skills to master. They are lifelong investments in your design-self that won’t hold a single candle to “learning to vibe code”. These are foundational personal capabilities that AI can never take away from you. Each of these skillsets and modes of thinking are founded on thousands of years of craft and community. And they offer material lifelines to your future self.

Invest in your capacity to think, create, and dream. It is your truest birthright.

Re-examine values

In this wild age of hyper-speed breaking (and often distressing) news, knowing what you stand for can create spaciousness and calm throughout your life. It will also ideally provide porous boundaries that you can stand behind when and if you need to emotionally protect yourself. A few years ago, when lying on the floor with panic attacks and really unable to see where I was haded, my therapist asked me to look again at what is foundational.

  • What gives you hope?
  • What do you stand for?
  • What makes you most angry?
  • What would you put your life on the line for?
  • What do you care about more than anything else in the world?

These are not easy questions for me to answer and I assume they are not easy for anyone. But grappling with these questions today, in a deliberate and even formal way, should theoretically help elucidate what you are most excited about, what you most want to accomplish, and what you most need to tackle soon. There are endless courses, books, frameworks and videos about finding your why. Simon Sinek and Mel Robbins are two popular and good places to start. But you might also want to read Parker Palmer or Gabor Maté.

It doesn’t really matter where or how you tackle the question of values. Perhaps just pen and paper? Writing them down in Apple Notes is good enough.

Here are mine. While imperfect works in progress, they have pretty much stayed true to me over the years.

  1. Prioritize family.
  2. Stick with friends.
  3. Be a mensch.
  4. Listen.
  5. It’s not about me.
  6. Notice super-connection.
  7. Stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves.

Explore mystery

There is an opportunity before all of us every minute of the day, including while we sleep. It’s obscure and seems arcane. But we are each of us part of something much broader than our meagre minds can contemplate. We are ashes. Star dust. Clouds. We are also composed of a universal momentum that is independent of us, wholly uncontrollable by us, and embraced by everything else around us.

Trying to notice this is hard. But also, everything?

Palmer, in his book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, writes: “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

Listening to our lives is the work of each of us but I submit that it is even more critical for us designers and creative oddballs. There is nothing truly known about the universe’s unfolding. We are composed of a series of educated guesses and strong hunches strung together on a hot filament.

It’s a short high wire act between the Big Bang and our final farewell, this life.

The great philosophers tell us that deeply acknowledging, exploring, or imagining what it must be like to transcend this space, to be a squirrel, or to live with equanimity is our heritage. And yet we often do not or cannot make it a priority or, for whatever reason, are not alive to the possibility of mystery and interconnection.

I think most designers and creators actually are. We figure everything out in real time while simultaneously making sense of the past, planning for the future, and offering educated guesses today. We know what it means to create something from nothing, to stare at a blank canvas and to make a single mark, to live with uncertainty, and to create bridges to nowhere, for now. 

We are deeply conditioned to know what we don’t know. And when we cannot find answers, we sit in the silence of the unknown for hours, days, or weeks until some answer is manifest (or we just Google it). But this is our job. Our role as designers and creators is not simply to solve problems but also to translate stories, transmit ideas, and talk with others.

Wishing you a good start to the day, the week, and the month.

Yours,

signature in blue pencil of Andrew Boardman

Note: This post was not written by or with AI. I’m seeing these little conditional clauses everywhere. My promise to you, dear designer, is to have my own thoughts visit your inbox, hopefully for the better. I do not use AI for image generation (except in those yucky first few struggling Dear Designer posts). All photos, drawings and doodles are mine. Other images are credited. I do sometimes use AI, however, to help me create a catchier and more searchable post title. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Quote of the Week

“Attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
— Simone Weil (TypeQuote)