I’ve been designing for a long time and I’ve seen plenty of tools come and go. While most of them promised increased efficiency, and a few delivered that, AI has actually changed how I think about my work. And it’s done this far more quickly than I would have thought possible.
When I first heard about AI and started experimenting with it, I was sceptical. Like many designers, I worried about what it might take away from the craft or even take away our livelihoods. But over time, AI has become part of my everyday process, not as a replacement for creativity, but as a tool to move through ideas faster and more freely.
I use it to explore concepts at speed, to unblock myself when I hit creative walls and to compress tasks that once took hours into minutes. That alone has changed the rhythm of my work. AI has given me the freedom to explore and try out new directions, because the cost in time of doing so has almost disappeared. You can test, learn and move on quickly, with no risk.
The biggest shift hasn’t been just in output, but also in mindset.
I now spend far less time purely executing my ideas and far more time shaping them, refining quality and deciding what’s actually worth putting out into the world. When execution becomes easier, judgement becomes more important.
Before AI, exploration came with a cost. Every new idea meant more time, more effort and often more justification. Now, exploration is cheap, and that changes how bold you can afford to be. But it also raises the bar, because weak ideas surface faster, average work becomes more obvious and careless decisions have nowhere to hide.
That’s where the real skill lies now, in maintaining quality and exercising strong creative judgement.
AI can generate options endlessly, but it can’t tell you which one matters. It doesn’t understand context, nuance or people. It doesn’t have taste, and it doesn’t care because it isn’t human.
Designers are human, and they care.
AI learns from history. It is built on existing patterns, existing content and existing decisions. If we allow it to lead entirely, we risk reinforcing what already exists instead of pushing boundaries. True originality rarely comes from optimisation – it comes from instinct, curiosity and human perspective. That right-brained ability to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist remains uniquely human, and it’s where designers add irreplaceable value.
More than ever, the value of a designer sits in discernment and emotion: knowing what to keep, what to discard, what to refine and what to challenge. The work isn’t about how fast you can produce something, but how confidently and thoughtfully you can make decisions, and how you can empathise with the result and the emotions it evokes.
I see this clearly when supporting other designers. The conversations have shifted from how to why. We spend less time talking about tools and more time talking about thinking, being creative in thought. Why this direction? Why this detail? What problem are we actually solving? Creative confidence and judgement now matter as much as technical skill, if not more.
There’s understandable anxiety around AI in creative work: fear of replacement, fear that the craft will be diluted. Fear that your colleagues will be robots and your sounding board will no longer have human emotions. But in practice, I’ve experienced the opposite. Standards are rising and designers are being pushed to care more, not less. The human side of design – empathy, intention, responsibility – is becoming more visible, not more redundant.
AI hasn’t replaced what I do. It’s clarified where my real value sits: in taste, context, instinct and care for the work. It’s pushed me to grow faster, think deeper and be more deliberate about every decision I make, and it has given me the space to be able to do this.
In the future, the very near future, the tools will obviously keep changing. The question is whether our thinking will evolve with them.
