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When anyone builds, perspective wins
AI as a designer
AI is already a great product designer, and it is accessible to every person. It isn't necessarily the best at visual design, information hierarchy, typography, or interaction design; it isn't the best at any single one of those. Where it goes from here is impossible to predict, and it will keep getting better.
What stays human
What stays human is truly understanding what people need, watching them use something and making sense of it, and inventing something new. There is also the plain fact that somebody made this and had a point of view about it. That stands out more as more products get made.
Standing out
Companies with great design have always stood out. With so much software being made, how well a product understands its users and delights them becomes one of the dimensions people use to judge it. The questions for a designer to sharpen are what their point of view is, and who they are building this for and why.
How did cheap tools reshape design before?
Desktop publishing arrived in the mid-1980s, when the Macintosh, the LaserWriter printer, and PageMaker software let ordinary people produce typeset pages. Page layout had previously required specialist equipment and trained typesetters. The pool of people making documents grew enormously, and the quality of a document's design became a way for makers to stand apart. Aldus released PageMaker in 1985, the same year Apple shipped the LaserWriter.
How does typography steer attention?
Size, weight, and spacing signal which parts of a page matter most, so a reader's eye lands on headings before body text. Nielsen Norman Group ran an eye-tracking study published in 2006 that found people often scan web pages in an F-shaped pattern. Readers looked across the top, then down the left side with shorter sweeps. Type choices decide what falls on that path.
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