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
One of the most common things I hear from clients before we start working together is some version of: I don’t think I’m ready yet. Usually they are. They just don’t know what ready looks like. There’s a version of “preparing for a website project” that spirals into months of second-guessing — rewriting your about […]
A beautiful website that nobody can find is a very expensive business card that lives in a drawer. I say this not to be harsh but because it’s the reality a surprising number of business owners are living without quite realizing it. They invested in design, got the site launched, and assumed that visibility would […]
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.
But I also don’t think the concern behind it is entirely wrong, and that distinction matters more than it might seem.
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.
