I Designed Yesterday, Infinitely: On mastery, meaning, and the modern designer

I’ve been thinking — which is usually where the trouble begins. Reflecting on the industry: the deluge of rebrands, the sea of stock assets, the general visual noise of it all. It seems we’ve designed everything. And the question I keep landing on: does design even matter anymore?

There was a time, for me, when design felt like a kind of secret language. You had to study it, apprentice in it, live inside typefaces and Pantone chips. You learned to spot kerning errors across a room and to argue about grids like they were moral frameworks. There was weight to it — a sense of belonging to a craft that few understood.

My design education was steeped in Design Thinking, popularized by firms like IDEO in the 1990s. It made designers sound almost oracular: we alone could empathize, ideate, and prototype our way to innovation. It promised to democratize design but, in practice, only re-centered the designer at the heart of every client’s problem. (Design Thinking for the Rest of Us, indeed.) For a while, it worked. There was mystique in the process. Clients hired us not just for what we made, but for how we thought. To be a designer was to be a translator — someone who could turn vague intentions into clarity, chaos into form.

Now, everyone speaks the language. Or at least, they think they do.

An entire generation has grown up with drag-and-drop interfaces, auto-layout tools, and algorithms that finish your compositions for you. Logos are generated, templates are tweaked, color palettes are suggested — all in seconds. What once took hours of ideation and iteration now happens in a text box that asks, “Describe what you want to make.”

And it’s worth saying — this isn’t totally a bad thing. I love how AI has streamlined parts of my job. But when creation becomes effortless, discernment becomes rare. The friction that once forged craft has been replaced by convenience. The same tools that democratized design have also diluted its meaning — not because the work is bad, but because it’s all starting to look the same.

Now? The noise is design. It’s no longer a sea of bad logos and clunky type.
It’s an ocean of perfectly adequate visuals — polished, consistent, instantly forgettable.

When Mastery Is Mass-Produced, What Matters?

Design has never been more available. Templates, type systems, auto-layouts — all ready to use, all free or nearly so. Need a logo? There’s an app for that. A brand identity? There’s a generator. A whole social campaign? Just drag, drop, and export.

And the results? Honestly… pretty good.

The era of bad design is over — at least, the obvious kind. What we get now are designs that are fine.
Polished enough to impress, consistent enough to trust, safe enough to sell. In a sense, the world got what it wanted. Design has been democratized. You no longer need a designer to design — just Wi-Fi and curiosity.

The craft that once set us apart has been folded into the interface.
But there’s a difference between looking designed and being designed.
Between arrangement and intention.
Between composition and communication.

Most DIY design hits the mark visually but misses it emotionally. It’s cohesive but not compelling — familiar to the point of invisibility. That’s the trade-off we’ve made for convenience: the loss of perspective, the erosion of discernment.

When everyone can make something that looks good, design stops being a differentiator. It becomes atmosphere — omnipresent, invisible, assumed.

Maybe that’s why mastery still matters. Not because the world needs more designers, but because it needs people who can see the difference between what works… and what means something.

Beyond Aesthetics: The Designer’s Role in a Post-Design World

When everything looks good, design stops being the differentiator. That’s where the designer’s role begins — not in color palettes or typography, but in connection. Because design isn’t just what things look like anymore; it’s how they work together.

From brand narrative to product experience, visual identity to voice, the designer’s craft is now about coherence — building systems that feel intentional across every touchpoint. Anyone can make something beautiful. But beauty without alignment is noise.

The designer’s skill lies in translating strategy into form — in making meaning legible.
We’re not just arranging shapes; we’re orchestrating relationships: between brand and audience, product and story, message and moment.

You can buy taste.
You can rent tools.
But you can’t automate understanding.

That’s what still sets designers apart — the ability to see the whole system, to hold every moving part in their head and still ask, does this belong? In a world where everything looks good, good isn’t good enough. What matters now is what holds it all together. The tools will keep improving. The templates will keep multiplying. And still, somewhere in the middle of all that noise, a designer will stop, look at the whole thing, and ask — does this belong?