At almost every inflection point in my career, I knew at least one designer who was convinced the new thing was the death of the art form.
Photoshop was going to end traditional illustration. Web-based builders were going to make designers obsolete. Drag-and-drop tools were going to commoditize everything. Stock photography was going to kill original visual thinking. And now AI. AI is going to end creativity itself, replace human designers entirely, produce a world of machine-generated sameness from which genuine artistry cannot survive.
None of the previous ones were right. I don't think this one is either.
The Rise of Fast Design and What We Lose Because of It
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A client’s guide: practical answers for people hiring a designer or building a site.
What human design offers that AI can’t replicate
Making your website work harder, for your business and in search
The craft: what makes things look and feel right
The why: how design makes people think, feel, and trust
There’s a version of web design that treats a website like a decoration, something that needs to look good enough to pass inspection and then get out of the way. It’s a common approach. It’s also why so many businesses have websites that technically exist but functionally don’t do much. A website is not a […]
When most people think about texture, they think about the physical world. The roughness of raw wood against smooth stone. Matte paint beside glossy tile. A linen sofa in a room full of hard edges. Texture is how we experience dimension — how we know, instinctively, that a space has depth and intention and something […]
Most business owners can tell when a website looks good. Very few can tell, at a glance, whether it’s actually working. That’s not a criticism. It’s a design problem. The gap between a website that’s visually impressive and one that genuinely performs for a business is real, significant, and almost invisible to the untrained eye. […]
the designer
Nicole has been in design for thirty years, across television, advertising, academia, and now this. Every Kismet project runs through her from start to finish.
It was always going to end up here. It just took thirty years to figure it out.
