Why Hire a Designer in the Age of AI?

Note: The following video was originally recorded as a verbal outline for this essay in order to later be transcribed into a more polished blog post on my design studio’s website. I decided to release the original recording because I feel that it’s a solid enough representation of my thoughts around this topic. While I tightened up some thoughts and turns of phrase in the written version, I ended up keeping it mostly in tact and true to the original transcription.

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Transcript

Why should you hire a designer in the age of AI? AI can do everything, right? There’s so many AI tools out there and they are really powerful. They can help you brainstorm and come up with some pretty good ideas. They can help you create content outlines. They can even do the actual copywriting for you. They can generate image assets for you. They can do research for you and pull together actual links and be able to to actually cite their sources sometimes, and it’s pretty impressive. So why should you hire a designer?

Why should you hire somebody to help you with your branding or your website or create a content calendar or a brand strategy when you can just turn to AI?

I’m going to give you a couple of reasons, and explain just what exactly the role of a designer actually is, because I think it’s kind of gotten lost in this age of AI. And I think that there’s maybe a misconceived notion of what designers actually do.

I think that a lot of people think that they can just replace designers with these AI tools purely based on output. Yeah, there are some things that you can use AI for instead of going to a designer. But is that the best idea? I would argue no. Designers have something that AI does not have, and that is humanity. We can actually see things. We can feel things. We can experience things. We have emotions.

We also typically have training. I don’t want to give a firm number or year range where you become a “professional designer.” But, let’s say you go to school and you study visual communication design like I did. Or you go to school and study some other kind of graphic arts or visual media or multimedia program or marketing and you get a baccalaureate degree or bachelors of fine arts. Maybe you even go and get a master’s degree and really specialize in some kind of aspect of design or visual arts or visual communication.

That education, right there, is something AI is trying to replace by consuming and stealing all sorts of content to be able to give answers that seem pretty credible on the first pass. But a significant part of what we’re doing in these programs, and then what we’re doing in the real world as working designers and professionals, is not just creating research documents that then ultimately inform strategy, or generating the visual aspects of a branding system, or putting together presentations, or building lead-generating websites—we’re learning how to think and and how to observe.

There’s a reason why design thinking is a whole concept in and of itself, because it’s not just the visual aspects that encompasses design. It’s the intake of the world around us, the observation, the deep thought of considering all the different aspects of what we’re experiencing and the things that we consume and the ideas that we wrestle with and the activities that we participate in and the the connections that we make with other people.

We’re building this library of ideas in our minds and training this way of seeing and thinking that then helps inform us in our visual problem solving. Ultimately, that’s what design is: it’s problem solving.

You’re relying on your senses to be able to interact with the world, whether that’s using your eyes and ears to navigate your surroundings or using your hands and your eyes to navigate a user interface online. It’s all the senses that you experience when you’re walking into a space that has been designed a certain way, or an exhibit that has been presented to you in a certain way. AI cannot do all of these things. AI does not have senses. AI is predictive. It is ultimately a pattern recognition tool. It is not creative.

It may seem creative, but it’s responding to your prompts in the way that it thinks is the best way to respond to your prompt. It’s taking all the knowledge that it has been fed, along with the work of real people whose job is to comb through data and manually train these AIs (and often on stolen and copyrighted content), and generating an answer that it believes best satisfies the prompt. But there’s still a need for the human element to arrive at solid design decisions.

AI is just trying to give you the answer that you’re looking for. And that’s not really the role of a designer. A designer is not just a “yes” man. A designer is going to have discernment and going to push back—we’re typically a pretty opinionated bunch. Our number one goal is to arrive at the best possible solution to your problem, and we are willing to go through all of the steps and exploration necessary in order for that to happen. We also just experience the world in a way that a computer simply does not.

We are able to iterate and refine and then test continuously, evaluating not only amongst our colleagues and stakeholders, but also with ourselves. Can AI do that? I don’t really think so. And maybe when it comes to things like internal presentation templates, yeah, that can probably be handled by a straightforward template and plug in your information. But that’s not really what I’m referring to.

When you’re thinking about all the different aspects of a branding system or your business’s touch points, AI just doesn’t understand that experience because it will never actually be able to be on the receiving end. And yeah, one might argue, “maybe not yet, but it will.” Sure, you can feed it all of your brand assets and then it can generate new ones for you based on those assets. But that’s not really being creative, that’s being iterative.

Again, AI is just using all those patterns that it has recognized in its system and then giving you outputs that, sure, may look different to you, right now, as an individual observing the results. But is AI aware that maybe 50 other companies are doing it as well, because they’re also using the same tool? Does it care? Not really. That’s the thing—AI doesn’t care. It just does not care. I’m going to repeat that over and over again forever. AI does not care.

The only thing that it is programmed to do and care about is giving you an answer or an image or a video to meet the prompt that you give it. But designers are humans and we care. We’ve built our entire profession on caring. On caring about a good user experience. On caring about a solid brand. On caring about clarity. On caring about differentiation. On caring about sound design strategy. On caring about how something looks or how something feels. Because all of that feeds into our emotions.

You know, we like to think that we are rational, logical beings, but we’re not. The majority of everything that we do is based on emotion. And AI doesn’t have emotions.

It’s much more overt in consumer marketing, but even when we think of the sales process of B2B, we need to remember the emotional component when creating marketing and design strategies. When it comes to B2B brands that aren’t really trying to sell a product to a consumer, or maybe have their own niche industry or a product that may seem pretty dry to a layman, emotion plays a huge role in the sales process, and we can reinforce that through design strategy and storytelling. 

Sometimes companies don’t really value design, or at least don’t think they do… until they realize what good design and visual problem solving actually is and what it means to their bottom line—it makes your life easier. It makes people perceive you better. It makes you more organized. It makes things more streamlined. It makes you look more put together, because how you present yourself to the world is a designed experience. And all of these aspects directly feed into our emotions.

You should be designing the way that you look, the way that you speak, the way that you present yourself, what your digital experience is like, how you show your work. You should care about all these things and the design thinking behind them. Because the way that we interact with other businesses as consumers or as other businesses or as vendors, as buyers, as clients, as customers is through emotion.

We try to justify it through logic. But when you think about the text that you see on a page when you’re trying to make a rational buying decision, typically that copy is leaning into behavioral science principles. I’m not saying that everything is necessarily manipulation, but it takes an understanding of human psychology and how we move through and interact with the world and how we perceive things to write good copy that then persuades you to act. It’s all based on emotion. So can AI do that? Does AI have emotion?

Sometimes it seems like it does. They’ve programmed it to sound actually pretty human sometimes, pretty friendly sometimes. If you’re a decent person, you maybe even want to say “please” and “thank you” to it sometimes. But it’s a computer and it’s not going to actually be able to experience your designs. It’s not going to be able to experience your brand. It’s not going to be able to actually even talk to you, even though it sounds like it if you turn on the generative voice.

So why should you hire a designer in the age of AI? Because we care, because we experience, and because we are visual problem solvers.

Not even to mention the fact that AI is still just not even capable of the entire brand experience in terms of the hard skills like print. Print design using AI tools is garbage. Trying to design anything print-related in Canva always results in headaches. And I don’t know, maybe it’ll change one day and maybe Canva will replace InDesign…but I strongly doubt it. There are so many technical considerations when it comes to print specifically, because now you’re also dealing with physical materials, hardware, printing processes, etc. Computers don’t understand that because computers can’t feel things. They don’t have tactile senses.

Another example is e-commerce. I know they’re training AI tools to go through things like checkout flows and buy things for you. But does that instill a sense of confidence in the product to you as a buyer? Are you confident that it’s purchasing a “buy it for life” product or is the AI agent buying something that maybe it was incentivized to buy for you… and you’re just gonna have to buy it again soon because it breaks anyway? AI doesn’t care. 

Another good example where AI falls flat is judgment. Human judgment is something that AI just cannot replace. It can sometimes come pretty close, and sound pretty convincing. I’ve used AI actually pretty extensively—it’s not like I’m an AI luddite. I’ve been using it since early 2024 or so, during ChatGPT’s earlier models like 2.5 or 3. Yeah, it’s pretty powerful, but you don’t really know what you’re doing unless you know your subject matter. There have been so many times where I’ve told it that it’s wrong and then I just get frustrated and I go in loops. Then I have to take a step back and I’m like, why am I sitting here? Fighting with this robot when I know what I’m doing and I know the answer? And then I just go back to square one and I feel frustrated because I wasted all my time.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is really powerful. I use it all the time for certain things. It can be a good brainstorming partner, but that’s only because I’m able to make connections from elsewhere. I read a ton of different books and I consume a lot of different kinds of material and learn about a lot of different domains, not just in design and web development. I think it’s really important to have hobbies and interests and other things that are informing your judgment that are outside of your profession. Because part of what we do as designers is we’re taking inspiration from elsewhere.

And really, that is especially true in branding, when you’re trying to create a brand that is visually different and distinct from your competitors. You’re trying to make a strong case for why you, as a customer, should buy their product or buy a service over your competitors. You can’t do that just following the patterns that already exist. You’re just going to look like everybody else. And a lot of times, the biggest breakthroughs and inspiration come from the wildest places. That’s the beauty of our brains.

That’s what we are able to do as designers—make these connections both consciously and subconsciously and then distill that into a brand framework and brand attributes and visual representations of your brand that then can be applied through a well-executed design system. Can AI do that? I don’t think so.

So why should you hire a designer in the age of AI? Because we actually perform the role that you’re using AI for, but we do it better. That’s what we’re trained to do. And the biggest difference between us and the robot is that we are human and we care.

We’ve spent years honing our craft, our vision, our discernment, our creativity. These things AI just cannot ever replace. It will never be able to experience life, but real people do. They experience your brand, and your website, and your social media channels, and your content, and your office, and your space every day.

So wouldn’t you want a human driving that? That’s up to you.