Jarrett Fuller

My latest essay for Fast Company went live last week. It’s called AI Isn’t Design’s Biggest Problem and tries to weaves together some threads I’ve been thinking through a lot this summer. Here’s the hook:

Like an essay written by ChatGPT, most of the results of AI design look very similar: the averaging of everything else. Unfortunately, that also sounds like a good description of a lot of contemporary graphic design. Today’s graphic designers are using the same tools, designing for the same contexts, and following the same patterns. Perhaps AI feels threatening to graphic designers because, in many ways, they already design like AI.

The argument I’m trying to make is that fear of AI taking our (graphic designer’s) job overlooks all the ways we’ve automated and standardized our jobs away already. From the rise of design systems and design thinking to the increasingly siloed ways designers work, the evolution of the industry over the last twenty years has made it ripe for an AI takeover. Design, at one time, was about creating difference — finding ways to stand out in a crowded field of products, advertisements, images, and messages. Today’s design world seems less interested in difference than it does in efficiency, standardization, systems; all things AI seems to be good at:

The rise of systems thinking in design, especially with design thinking, both expanded the opportunity for design while also standardizing the expectations for it. In systematizing the design process, it gave design—and especially graphic design—a way to legitimize itself, elevating it to the likes of engineering and science (two fields, incidentally, where AI poses a large threat) where decisions could be tested and adapted. With a design thinking methodology, graphic designers could lean not on their authorial opinions or stylistic preferences but on user research, A/B testing, and iterative design processes.

In 2009, for example, Google famously couldn’t decide between two shades of blue for the links on their search results. To find a solution, they tested 41 gradations to see which ones users preferred. (Doug Bowman, then Google’s visual design lead, left the company, blaming, in part, their data-driven design decisions.) At the time, this caused a minor controversy in the design world but it was also a signal of what was to come. Designers now live in the world design thinking has built: Design Thinking has so defined design over the last twenty years that when I asked Claude AI to define design, it told me the five-step design thinking process.

Which is to say: this essay isn’t really about artificial intelligence but rather is a revisionist history of graphic design trying to find where we’ve lost our way: where we traded originality for trends, criticality for solutions, creativity for systems. As I write in the piece: AI will only feel threatening to designers because they’ve already started designing like AI. I kept thinking about Ted Chaing’s line that fears of new technology are really fears of capitalism while writing. In some ways, that feels relevant here too. I’m not faulting designers — or the design industry at large — for any of this; they/it is just responding to market forces, client demands, shifts in the economy. But what I’m trying to do is shift the conversation away from AI, as a technology, to what I think is a bigger and more interesting set of questions for graphic designers at this moment: what do we want design to be and what do we want from it? What makes for good design? Where can design go next?

I close the piece drawing an analogy to my favorite period of graphic design history: the mid-90s. That era was similar to our own: profound change across the economy, politics, and technology. For graphic design, there was a fear the desktop computer would take the jobs away. What happened, instead, was one of the most interesting, original, and exciting decades for graphic design. Can we have that again?

This felt like the hardest thing I’ve written. My editor, Liz Stinson, and I went through multiple edits to clarify my argument because I wasn’t quite sure if it was landing and there so many directions to take it. Not much of what I write is zeitgeisty; I tend to favor obscure topics I want to bring forward in some new way so this was a different kind of piece for me. I’ve been delighted — and overwhelmed — by the response. It’s the first volley in what I hope is a series of new conversations around the state of graphic design today.

You can read the whole thing here. I’d love to hear your thoughts.