Digital Design Isn’t Dead. It Just Got Way More Interesting.

The end of the canvas means more, not less opportunities.

I’ve been around long enough to remember when designing a website meant slicing up jpgs in Photoshop and emailing them to a guy named Steve who “did the HTML.” Steve was also the sysadmin and eventually “webmaster.”

I also also a senior leader at InVision when Figma came along and destroyed our market leader position in a few years. That felt like a revolution but it’s only been a few years and already it feels like we’re tearing that canvas modality up and looking at design from a whole new perspective.

As much as I work with designers in Figma every day, we’re fast approaching the end of the Canvas Era. Now that AI is embedded in everyday workflow, it’s flipping the design-to-code script upside down. AI can do design tasks pretty well. It’s not perfect but it’s getting better by the day. Designers will now be expected to master these automation tools and put the thinking part of design above the doing part of design.

So… should designers be freaking out?

Yes, but not in the way you think.

What’s disappearing isn’t design. It’s a particular form of design that’s going away. The type of design you expect to see being replaced is the one that treated mockups as gospel and saw handoff meetings as a necessary ritual. If your entire job is organizing a sea of art-boards, I have bad news, AI’s already doing that. Faster. Cheaper. Sans coffee breaks.

I’m not saying AI is definitely better at these tasks, but the speed that it does it is very attractive to efficiency obsessed businesses.

But if your job is understanding what people need, imagining what doesn’t yet exist, and building experiences that connect those dots? You’re not obsolete. You’re invaluable.

From Pixel Pushers to Pattern Thinkers

In the future, designers will be less about crafting comps and more about creating systems. These systems include guidelines for governance, creative constraints, patterns, variables, and all the messiness of relationships. Think design operations meets behavioral psychology with a healthy amount of AI prompting. It’s UX heavy and UI light.

It’s less “make the button pretty” and more “define the logic that determines what the button should be, depending on where and when and for whom it appears.” Less craftsperson, more conductor. You’re not painting every pixel, you’re setting the parameters for a machine to generate a hundred versions of that creation while still making it feel human. It’s EQ meets AI.

That means, as designers, we need to shift our identity, not abandon it.

The Timeless Skills Still Matter More Than Ever

If you’re a young designer: stop trying to become an expert in some technology. That’s a moving target that is getting increasingly harder to follow. It’s not good enough to be a Figma expert or a React expert, or whatever new tech platform is coming around the corner.

Even the most basic version of ChatGPT can render pretty decent Figma and React files now. Cursor can generate a complex browser-ready app experience in hours. One engineer on my team built a basic version of Zendesk using Cursor in 40 mins! How long do you think it’ll be before it can create pixel perfect designs or error free code?

Start learning how to think like a strategist, write like a researcher, and learn to prompt like a poet. AI tools will do the production work. You need to provide the direction, the taste and the imagination. This is called discernment and it’s vital to successful design.

If you’re an older designer: yes, it’s disorienting. But you already survived the jump from print to web, Flash to HTML5, skeuomorphism to flat design, Photoshop to Sketch to Figma to vibe coding. You’re still here because your problem-solving muscles, storytelling instincts, and empathy sensors are timeless.

Keep using them.

Don’t Confuse the Tools With the Talent

Design tools are abstractions. They always were. Figma just did it better than the clunky junk we had before. But now, the abstraction layer is moving. We’re leaving behind rectangles-on-a-canvas for AI-driven agents that can create live experiences based on constraints, context, and intent.

This doesn’t mean your value disappears — it just moves up the stack.

• We still need humans to set the constraints.
• We still need taste to make tradeoffs.
• We still need experience to spot BS when the model hallucinates a UX pattern from 2009.
• And we still need people who can say, “Actually, I think this flow breaks down for someone on a prepaid phone trying to check their bank balance.”

That’s not going away.

So, What Should You Do?

Here’s my honest advice, as someone who’s made a career from being curious, slightly cynical, and always willing to start over:

• Stop pretending you’re an expert at AI. Nobody really does. Start playing with it instead. Play, don’t just work. Be the best at fucking around and finding out.
• Get curious about systems. Pattern libraries. Tokens. Design APIs. This is the new playground of Lego blocks we can build anything with.
• Build taste. AI can generate stuff but it can’t decide what’s good.
• Learn to write. Interfaces are increasingly conversational. Good copy beats good color palettes.
• Ship experiments. Not polished portfolios — proof of play. Show me you’ve tried something new, weird, or slightly ridiculous.
• Stay human. AI’s not replacing people. It’s replacing process. The ability to understand people — what they fear, desire, avoid, need — is still the bedrock of good design. Empathy hasn’t been automated.

One Last Thing

The design industry isn’t dying. It’s mutating. Again.

And that’s the fun part, isn’t it? We get to help invent what comes next. That’s always been the job. AI just turned up the speed dial.

So let’s stop mourning the end of the canvas and start sketching on a new kind of surface. This one is made of prompts, systems, live data, and buckets of human wisdom, taste and insight.

Because while the tools change, the best design advice I’ve ever gotten still holds: Make it useful. Make it beautiful. Make it work for real people.

And maybe — just maybe — make it weird once in a while too.