Bear with me. While not a universal standard for defining art, I love Richard Williamson’s @mckay_williamson Richard Williamson View on Instagram simplification of art classification. Novelty: how original is the work? Nuance: how difficult is it to make? And Narrative: what is the work trying to say? One could argue these three qualities are found in design too.

To drive a manual car, you need to shift into first gear to get moving. As you step on the gas and approach the right speed, you shift into second to go faster. You use a third pedal called the clutch, allowing you to move the stick into the next gear. The process is repetitive, yet it rarely feels the same.

Just like in design, we use the same frames, the same spacing, the same font guidelines, but each app or website feels different. Here is where the music comes in: the branding and core idea we try to express are the tune we’re driving to. An energetic track has me shifting faster and harder; in design, it translates to bright colors, exciting animation, and bold language.

I believe that if you’re a company or organization set out to help others, you first have to know yourself. This is where core beliefs come in. I know what your goal is, but why are you setting out to do this? To some it might sound a little foolish, but these are the pillars founders and teams lean on when tough decisions come up: who to hire, what to build next, or, in my case, what choices serve the user best in the long run.

Having worked with different clients and organizations, I can confidently say this work shapes culture. Done well, it’s a quiet superpower. Done on a whim, it quietly poisons everything downstream.

Once we have core values and a worthy goal (the mission), we can shape a vision: an almost foolishly ambitious idea that serves as the organization’s north star. Aim for the moon, and if you miss, you land among the stars.

After that comes tone, voice, messaging, and all the rest.

Every day I hear that AI has killed this industry or that one, and on social media I see designers calling it quits because they saw Claude or ChatGPT design a UI or logo in seconds instead of the 30 minutes it takes them. I think this is a flawed way for a UX/UI designer to think. The role was never just about producing designs. The real job is solving problems through empathy and taste, and I don’t think AI can do either of those.

Taste comes from lived experience, culture, and the ideas we’ve been shaped by. Without that, AI can only generate options. It can’t judge which option a real person, in a real situation, actually needs. That judgment is taste. Not taste as in “which shade of blue is trending,” but taste as in knowing what actually matters to real people in real situations. You can’t get that from a prompt. It’s built slowly, over years of paying attention to how people struggle, what confuses them, and what puts them at ease. And it’s never finished, because people keep changing, and so does the world around them.

Good design will start to mean something different: a uniquely individualized experience, shaped by people creating their own solutions to everyday problems. As more companies push everything into subscriptions, I think people will move toward building small tools and microservices for their friends and family instead, and sharing them the way people used to share CDs or albums, passed from one person to another. People will start taking ownership of the digital goods they use.

How you approach solving and building will become the real future of design, because machines already have a solid grasp of UI guidelines. The differentiator won’t be whether something looks clean. It will be the thinking behind why it was built at all.