Rate of Change in Design

A year ago I could tell you roughly how long it would take to design something. A new feature, a full product, a brand system. I had rough timelines from doing it a bunch of times across different companies and team sizes. That calibration now feels a bit arbitrary.

I can produce things that I would have never been able to product in an hour now. Not because the thinking is faster. The thinking is the same. But the distance between having the idea and holding the artifact has completely changed. I can go from a napkin sketch to a functional prototype before I realize my idea might not be that good. (Joking. My ideas are always good.) That changes what's possible in ways most design orgs haven't internalized yet.

The obvious take is “everyone will be replaced." I don't think that's right. What's actually happening is the bottleneck is shifting. Production was always the tax on taste. You had to spend hours in Figma executing the thing you already saw in your head. Now that tax is approaching zero. Which means the differentiator is entirely about what you decide to make and why.

This is uncomfortable for a lot of designers. Especially the ones who built their identity around craft execution. If your value was "I can design things beautifully in Figma," you're competing with a tool that can do that in seconds. But if your value was "I can walk into a room full of conflicting opinions, synthesize what actually matters, and produce the artifact that changes the conversation," you're more valuable than ever. The artifact just comes faster now.

The rate of change in tooling is accelerating. The rate of change in taste is not. Taste still takes years of reps, of looking at things, of building things and learning why they didn't work. That's the moat. (It always has been, btw.)

The designers who thrive in this moment will be the ones who were already operating above the tool layer. The ones who were already dangerous before the tools got good.