The state of AI and design

Here we are, a few months into the year, and there’s no sign of AI progress stopping in the world of design, apps, developement, everything.

Framer section

Figam section

OpenAI, Midjourney, Google section

OpenAI and Jony Ive section

  • All hype?
  • Potential the real next step in personal devices? We haven’t made a leap since the first iPhone. Are we just going to Her inspired world?

My 2025 end of year predictions:

  • Product designer roles will continue to decline, as the tools make their job exponentially easier – creating more variations and ideas, and allowing more production code to be written.
  • There will be a new role title for designers in this field, that will attempt to represent the duties of this person. Director, product designer, writer, FE dev, motion designer – these will all be done by few, with the tools as their assistants.
  • Agencies of one are going to become much more common. The individual running the agency will work with companies to take them from idea to functioning product and marketing site in weeks. With branding, and all content created during morning coffee. Social media strategies created and setup to run, with videos and all assets created on auto-pilot.

My thoughts on ecommerce stores haven’t changed for years. One of the reasons I left the agency world was I was constantly working on store design, and started to feel that we’ve reached the point of shopping that risks cannot be taken or they kill conversion. The Shopify Shop site is exactly how every store should look. Make it familiar, provide all the information that’s easy to find. There’s a learned behaviour with online shopping and we can’t go back now. Amazon and Shopify rule the space.

Product design is heading down this path. ShadCN, Tailwind, Material, are all examples of us going to the future as one. And I’m fine with this.

Fast-forward to not that long ago, and the rapid advancement of AI in our daily lives has brought things full circle. That’s where this site comes in. I started building it in Jekyll since it seemed straightforward with a quick turnaround, but it was suggested that I use Astro instead—I was told it’s perfect for what I’m looking to build.

Thanks to AI help, someone like me, with barely any React or other coding knowledge, can build, style, and publish this site.

Talk to y’all soon.