A Letter to the Next Generation of Designers

Dear designer,

Somewhere in the last year, the questions I hear in my mentorship sessions changed. They used to sound like “How do I get better at this?” Lately they sound like this:

• Is design still a career?
• Which tool should I learn first, before it gets replaced?
• Everyone online seems ten steps ahead of me. How do I catch up?

I have been mentoring designers on ADPList since 2021, in sessions with people across more than thirty countries. For over a year now I have watched the same thing happen again and again. People arrive confused, tired, and quietly sure they are already behind.

So I am writing you a letter. The first honest thing I can say is this: I feel it too.

It isn’t in your head

I get overwhelmed too. Not from a lack of work, but from a feeling of having so much to do with less time to do it. AI did not give me more hours. It gave the people around me, and me, a new idea of how much one person should be able to produce in a day.

What used to take a week is now expected by Thursday. Then the bar moves again.

There is an old lesson here. In the early twentieth century, electric washing machines, vacuum cleaners and stoves entered the home, and everyone assumed housework would shrink. The historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan studied what actually happened, and her answer, in More Work for Mother, is uncomfortably familiar. The machines did not empty the day. They raised the standard of what a clean home should look like, and the work grew to fill the time.

New tools rarely give us time back. They raise the standard, and the work expands to meet it.

The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon that comes from chronic stress that has not been successfully managed. It is not weakness. It is what happens when the pace outruns the person.

And it lands hardest on those who are just starting out. Let me tell you about a task from my own internship.

I once spent hours with the Pen tool in Photoshop, tracing the edges of hundreds of small items in a large beach photo, so I could extract a perfect background. Every curve by hand, every tiny gap, again and again. It took me many hours, and I wanted it to be flawless.

Today, AI does that in seconds, and does it perfectly. No intern will ever be asked to do what I did.

Part of me misses what those hours gave me: patience, an eye for edges, a respect for detail. But I also see what has really changed. The bottom rung of the ladder has been lifted. An intern no longer has to start by tracing pixels. They can be asked to think about the whole: the problem, the person, the flow from one screen to the next. The level of an intern has been raised, and so has what is expected of them.

That is exciting, and it is also a lot to carry when you are new. If that is where you are, I see you. The first rungs are being rearranged, and it is fair to feel unsettled by that.

We have been here before

Some people have predicted a crash. Others say everything is about to be automated. I do not have a crystal ball, but I do have history, and I find it comforting. Not because it promises anything, but because it shows a pattern.

1839, the camera. When photography was announced, painters faced a machine that could record a likeness faster than any portrait artist alive. Some declared painting finished. Instead, freed from the job of copying the world, painters started asking what only a person could show. Within a generation, Monet and his friends held the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, in 1874.

1985, desktop publishing. The Macintosh, the LaserWriter and PageMaker arrived within a year or two of each other, and suddenly anyone could set type and lay out a page. The old trades of phototypesetting and paste-up largely disappeared, and that was a real loss for real people. But the demand for people who could make a page that actually works did not vanish. It multiplied. The tool became cheap. Taste did not.

2000, the crash. The Nasdaq peaked in March 2000 and fell until October 2002. Websites vanished, and designers were laid off.

Many people left the industry convinced the web had been a fad. The ones who stayed learned the fundamentals: how people read, click and trust. In 2007 the iPhone arrived, and an entire new discipline, product design for mobile, grew out of what the crash had cleared away.

The ATM. When cash machines spread, everyone expected bank tellers to disappear. The economist James Bessen found that the number of tellers in the United States actually grew a little between 1980 and 2010, from roughly 500,000 to 550,000. Machines made branches cheaper to run, banks opened more of them, and the job shifted from counting cash to building relationships.

The tools changed every time. The question stayed the same: who is going to make this good?

I will not tell you that nothing will be lost. In each of these shifts, real people lost real livelihoods, and some will this time. What history offers is a pattern, not a promise. After every evolution comes a new dispensation: a new way of working, with new rules about who is valuable. The people who find their place in it are rarely the fastest. They are the ones who stayed grounded in something deeper than the tool of the moment.

What stays scarce

Here is the principle I keep coming back to. When everyone can generate, generating is no longer the skill.

Mediocre is now unlimited. Excellent is still rare.

And where supply is rare, demand follows. So where do you find the rare thing?

I see it in my own work. At Alerzo, my team ran 22 shop-along sessions and ledger audits with traders in Ibadan and Lagos markets. An AI can summarise a pile of notes in seconds, but it was the time spent in those markets that showed us the traders already kept ledgers. That one observation turned the Veedez onboarding from form-first to ledger-import-first.

At DealStack, I interviewed 14 representatives who were in constant contact with fund administrators, LPs and operations leads across three time zones, and I watched users work in the product over multiple sessions. That research surfaced seven painful steps in the fund-close process. AI can help you move faster on a project like that, and I will say more about getting good at it below. But it did not tell me which of those seven steps to fix first. People did.

Judgment. Taste. Context. Trust. Being accountable for the thing you ship. A machine can generate a thousand options. It cannot care which one is right for the person using it.

I believe this is where we are simply better. Taste comes from emotion, from having felt confusion, delight and frustration ourselves. Our experience and our uniqueness are not things to apologise for next to the machines. They are the advantage. Use them.

---

A method: Anchor, Oar, Tide

You cannot control the tide. You can control how you sit in the boat. Here is the method I use, and the one I share in sessions.

Anchor: the basics and who you are

An anchor does not stop the boat from moving. It stops you from being carried somewhere you never chose.

Your anchor is the basics: composition, typography, hierarchy, research, empathy, storytelling. These are where your taste comes from, and taste is made from feeling as much as from knowledge. The more powerful the tools get, the more those foundations matter, because they are what let you tell a good result from one that merely looks finished.

Then write a purpose statement. Ask yourself why you design, who you design for, and when you want to look back and see that it mattered. I wrote about this in [5 Lessons I Learnt While Building a Design Career](/writing/five-lessons-building-a-design-career). Then choose three non-negotiables that no tool or deadline can talk you out of.

Oar: keep rowing, and never do mediocre

Take every opportunity that comes. Offer to help a friend’s small business. Volunteer on something real. Make a thing and give it away; I published a free set of Lottie icons for other designers and developers, and the lesson was in the making. Start small, and do it often.

Choose one skill to go deep on and one adjacent skill to widen your range. I wrote about why that range matters in [Why a Multi-Skill Approach Will Help You as a Designer in Tech](/writing/multidisciplinary-designer-in-tech).

Embrace AI, and get great at it. We all have to. Learn what it does well and where it goes wrong, how to brief it clearly, how to check its work, and when to put it down and think for yourself.

Then raise your floor. Let AI take the heavy lifting, and spend your own time on what only you can do: the person on the other side, the edge cases, the story, the last ten percent of detail. Every time you deliver something, give it the best you have. That habit is what the market will remember.

Tide: read it, do not fight it

Embrace the evolution as it moves. Do not try to learn everything, because you cannot. Instead, give the tide one hour a week. Read, try one new tool, and note what changed. Choose three sources you trust, and let the hot takes pass.

And rest. You cannot out-row a tide for twelve hours. Take real time off-screen. Burnout will not be solved by another course or another prompt; it is solved by a sustainable pace.

If you are just starting out

A few specific things, from what I see work in sessions:

• Build proof from real problems, even small ones, and write down what you learned.
• Learn in public. A single honest post about something you got wrong teaches more than a polished portfolio piece.
• Find one person a few steps ahead of you and ask for ten minutes of their time. Mentors exist for exactly this.
• Get good at AI early, and use it as a tutor, not a crutch. Ask it why, then check the answer yourself.
• Keep practising the basics by hand, even when a tool could do them. That is how taste grows.
• Be patient with the first year. Everyone who looks ahead of you felt behind once.

If you lead or have been around a while

The ladder is partly our responsibility. If the small tasks that taught us are disappearing, we have to deliberately give juniors real work with real stakes, explain our reasoning out loud, and make it safe to say “I’m overwhelmed.” Anyone trying to find their feet in this new world, at any level, deserves a place to ask honest questions.

---

I do not know exactly where this goes. Nobody does. But I believe that if we stay true to ourselves, stay anchored and keep rowing, we will find ourselves in the right place.

You are not behind. You are early to something nobody has finished writing. Keep rowing. — Ayodeji