Designers vs. Robots: take steps to safeguard your craft
The deepening integration of our lives with automated services is simultaneously amazing and terrifying. New technologies have great power to disrupt the status quo and offer us amazing conveniences. But so too can they rapidly reconfigure landscapes, displace jobs, and leave people behind.
How will the complexion of the world change once millions of people can no longer get jobs as baristas, financial advisors, cashiers, truckers and taxi drivers? What happens if 50% of the human population is considered redundant and functionally unemployable? Can a guaranteed universal income help define life after capitalism? Will my dad ever trust a teenage robot to cut his grass? Only time will tell.
It’s comforting-ish to remember that visual design is at its core a creative service, and therefore somewhat insulated from the initial waves of algorithm- and template-based services. However, we shouldn’t take anything for granted these days — after all, if we’re able to create a computer system that’s as powerful (or more powerful) than the human brain, we have to assume that system is going to be able to do anything we can, including “be creative.”
Driverless cars are only a handful of months away from being a big big deal. Wealthsimple has already humanized alien-grade financial software into something we trust with our financial futures. Companies like Squarespace, thegrid.io, Format, and Shopify are just some of the initial iterations of responsive- and commerce-focused services that have the power to completely commoditize web design (or have already) with pre-defined solutions.
So what are designers to do? What steps can be taken to stay relevant in the job market for hopefully many years to come? Consider the following suggestions (untested gut instincts, really) on how visual designers can adjust their service offering to help ensure a place in the job market amidst the uncertainty of the not-so-distant future.
Put more emphasis on discovery and strategy deliverables
Many clients need help with properly defining their problem — and this kind of exercise isn’t really suited for intake forms alone. Humans in this case have a distinct advantage. Insights into brand authenticity, business goals, and competitive landscape positioning sometimes only come from organic conversations and asking good questions in the flesh. Clear problem definition is one of the most valuable assets for a design project, since design at its core is a problem solving activity.
This is not to say that discovery and design strategy play a diminished role in design today. Indeed they are critical aspects of any successful exercise. But as bespoke visual solutions are increasingly priced out of the picture, shifting emphasis to strategy will help extend your practice into the new paradigm.
If the evolving nature of design (at least when it comes to the responsive web) is more about selecting from pre-existing themes rather than creating those solutions from scratch, good work will be defined by how appropriately you can curate and assign those existing assets and services.
Discovery and problem definition, deeper audience profile generation, competitive landscape analysis, and communication/brand strategy packages are all good examples of strategy work that should precede a typical visual execution phase. If your range of design services doesn’t already include these deliverables, perhaps it’s a good time to broaden your horizons!
Get better at copywriting
Virtually every business needs good copy. It really doesn’t matter how nice the type looks if the words themselves are shallow, artless, or otherwise inappropriate. This is especially relevant when you consider that all marketing and digital product design incorporates some kind of written message. Learn to master words to supercharge simple text-based layouts. Write captivating headlines, subheads, key paragraphs, and calls-to-action that are tailored for the intended audience.
Better copywriting elevates design in every instance — it delivers messages with wit or clarity, drives conversions, answers questions, and creates meaningful emotional connections.
It’s also no secret that cultural nuance and other wordplay is like kryptonite to the machines. Becoming more aware of your own perception, culture, and slang vocabulary is therefore essential. Incorporate this awareness into your design exercises and you’ll put some real distance between yourself and the wannabe robot copywriters.
Offer more innovative designs whenever possible
Templates and visual conventions utterly dominate the contemporary web. This makes sense as companies seek to bring their products and ideas to market in efficient ways before reinvesting more deeply in design exercises. We definitely get it, and use various services to our own advantage as well (thanks Medium!) — but the effects can be disheartening all the same.
Granted, this is likely a First World problem (Waahhh! So many websites look the same, fml) so we acknowledge how privileged we are to even gripe about the degree of sameness online. From one perspective, who cares, at least we have fast internet and hordes of glorious devices with which to browse it! But on the other hand, we live in this space everyday. As trained designers who are driven to push the envelope and find new and interesting ways to communicate, we can’t help but feel the gravity of sameness pulling us all into some bland, crippling, predictable core.
So what’s another solution to staying relevant in a world dominated by templates and thoughtless centre alignments? Invest the time to create something novel and effective. Take advantage of the ever expanding possibilities of front-end implementation. Then learn to communicate the value of those solutions to your clients as something memorable and ownable. Not all clients will see the value, to be sure. But keep pushing and eventually you’ll find people who believe moving beyond templates can be good for business in the right instances. They’ll also be willing to pay for it.
Take time to consider your practice as a designer and see if there’s room to expand into any of the areas above. Even subtle shifts into strategy, copywriting, and visual design innovation will offer your clients something that robots and templates cannot accomplish — at least for the time being.
