The production tier of design work is gone
By Allan Leone on
Not design jobs in general. One specific tier: the work where the brief arrived fully specified and the task was to render it. That tier paid a lot of rent and taught a lot of people their craft.
The honest version of the AI and jobs conversation is neither "designers are fine" nor "we are finished". One clearly identifiable tier of work evaporated, and the rest did not.
The tier where the decisions were already made and the task was execution. Resize this into nine placements. Same layout, different market. Turn these notes into a deck by Thursday.
Why it went first
It had the two properties that make work automatable. The input was fully specified, so nothing had to be inferred about intent. And the output was judged against a fixed reference, so correctness was checkable without taste.
Anything with those two properties was going to go. It is worth noticing that the same test predicts what is safe: work where the input is ambiguous and the output is judged against a goal rather than a template.
The part nobody has solved
That tier was where juniors learned. Not because the work was educational in itself, but because volume builds pattern recognition. You produce two hundred layouts and you start to see, without being told, why some sit right and some do not.
Remove the volume and the apprenticeship goes with it. The profession has not replaced that mechanism, and most of the advice being given to juniors right now quietly assumes someone else will.
What partly replaces it
The closest substitute I have found is structured critique of generated work. Give someone a brief and twenty generated options and ask them to rank and justify. It exercises the same judgement the volume used to build, at higher density and without the tedium.
It is not identical. Producing something teaches things that evaluating it does not. But it is considerably better than nothing, which is the current default.
Where to start
- If most of your week was production work, pick one project and ask to be in the framing conversation. Not for extra pay. For the record of having done it.
- Start keeping a decisions log. What you recommended, what the alternative was, what happened. That document is what the surviving tier is hired on.
- If you lead a team, replace lost volume work with weekly critique sessions on generated output. Twenty options, ranked, justified out loud.
- Be direct with juniors about which tier their current work sits in. Vague reassurance is worse than a clear map.
Tags: careers, ai, design