← The Angry Designer Graphic Design, Freelancing, Branding & Creative Business Podcast
The Angry Designer Graphic Design, Freelancing, Branding & Creative Business Podcast
What AI Can’t Replace in Graphic Designers
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Can designers actually become AI proof? Let's be honest. That's the question that every designer is secretly wondering right now. And then just when you start getting comfortable and feel a little better about using AI in your design process to stay competitive, somebody then leans in and says, just wait until AGI comes. Like, what the. As if AI AGI is now going to make customers understand whatever the heck it is that they actually want. Here's the thing that most designers never stop to think about. AI isn't the problem here. The problem is not knowing what makes you irreplaceable to customers. Because the truth is, AI doesn't replace all designers. It just replaces a very specific type of designer. And if you don't know which type of designer you are, well, that's when things actually get a little scary. In this episode of the Angry Designer podcast, powered by Wix Studio, we're digging into the part of design that AI can't touch, and why AGI won't make a single difference. And why becoming AI proof is not only possible for designers, but it's a lot more in your control than you actually think. Let's go. All right. For the record, over the past 25 years of owning my own 7 figure creative agency, I've lived this end of design moments many times. I mean, desktop publishing was going to be the end of design, and templates were going to be the end of design. And Fiverr was going to be the end of design. And Canva was definitely the end of design. It turns out that one was just about bad taste. And yet, creative agencies still exist, graphic designers still rock, and some of them are making some serious money. Why? Because AI didn't kill design. It just made something really obvious about designers. Or we basically have two kinds of designers. We've got creative designers, we've got strategic designers. Both make things look great and follow the same design principles, but their processes are very different. And for the record, most of us started as one, just some of us evolved into the other. Creative designers make things look great. They rock the software, they kill the brief, they wait for client revision, and then they hand over the work. And when they're done, they invoice and move on to the next customer. Strategic designers, on the other hand, they try to solve the problems. They focus on outcomes, they ask why, they question the brief, create systems, and when they're done, they invoice the customer, and then they go back and ask, how did it perform? AI threatens designers whose entire value is tied to making things look good. That's it done. I know you don't want to hear that, but it's true. If your whole job is just surface level polishing, working with tools and colors and fonts and vibes and making it pretty well, AI loves that kind of work. Tell the machine to get. Give me 30 variations and you get 300 variations, which is great if you want to see a ton of options that you'll never use. But the thing is, that's the creative territory AI is coming for. But strategic designers, they're not focused solely on making things look good. They're trying to understand what the real problem is first. Clients don't have a clue why their website isn't getting them leads and why customers aren't responding to ads and why nobody's coming into their store and buying their products. These are problems that a refreshed brand just can't solve. And neither can AI. AI can't walk into a boardroom and untangle that mess. And until it can read the room and catch that moment when the CEO says one thing and means something completely different, Strategic designers are completely AI proof. And that's the real value designers bring. Not just the creative execution, but in providing a creative solution to a problem. And I think that that's the difference that these AI hype guys just. They just don't get. Equal access to tools doesn't mean equal results. If tools alone killed designers, well, Canva would have wiped us out years ago. But having Canva doesn't make our clients designers. Just. Just like having chat GPT doesn't make them strategists. Truth is, most business owners don't understand positioning and psychology and why their message isn't working. They think that they need a new logo, but what they really need is probably something much higher level. They just can't see that shit for themselves. Themselves, unfortunately. So can designers become AI proof? All right, straight up, absolutely we can. Okay? Not trendy hype proof and not LinkedIn post proof. I mean, I'm talking real life here, people, okay? There's some parts of design that will get hit by AI, sure. But becoming AI proof designer, that's a whole different game. Like, number one, you gotta stop starting at the end of the project. If a client says, I need an ebook, your first move can't be to look for inspiration in open indesign. I mean, you've already given away. You know the only part of the job that AI can't do? Real designers practice restraint and they don't jump right into the creative, okay? They start with the bigger Picture understanding what the problem is. And you do that by asking questions that nobody else does. Why do you need this ebook? You know, what do you want people to do after they read this ebook? Is this ebook meant to grow your current business or is it just credibility? Okay, imagine how differently you would approach. Approach the creative if you found out that the intent of this book was to acquire new customers versus just educating existing ones. These are the kind of insights that clients actually pay designers for every single day. AI may be able to do the work if somebody asks them, but the designer is the one who defines the work that needs to be done. That, my friends, is design. Now, this next part might suck for some of you, but if you get it, your billing cred goes through the roof. Number two, you need to learn how businesses work. And I get it. Talking to clients about margins and their competition or pricing strategy. It feels weird at first because this is like private stuff that you're supposed to keep from customers. But here's the thing. You're not a customer. You are a professional. And you're there to help their business. And you can design the most effective solution. Creative solution. Without understanding the real problem. Yeah, it feels weird. And you know, it might even be a little uncomfortable at first, but you get over it because these are the metrics that clients base every single business decision on daily. Okay? The designer who understands how a business operates. They don't get replaced. They get invited to solve bigger problems for bigger projects with bigger budgets. And now a word from our sponsor designers. Let's be honest. Web design should be a graphic designer's job. It's bold, it's creative, it's experimental, and at its core, it is design. Layout just brought to life online. But somewhere along the way, graphic designers lost it. Developers took over, tools got complicated, and creativity took a back seat to code. Thing is, clients still expect us to bring their brand to life everywhere. And if we're not offering web design today, you're leaving money and potential opportunities on the table. That's where wix Studio comes in. It's the web platform built for designers with a drag and drop interface that feels like a designer's tool. Plus, no code animations and AI powered tools. You can create fully custom websites that match your vision. Every pixel, every layout, every detail. So whether it's a simple branded brochure site or an online portfolio, or even a full blown e commerce experience, wix Studio makes it all possible for graphic designers with tools that think like a designer, not like a developer. The web doesn't need more templates. It needs you and your creativity unleashed. And WIX Studio is going to give you that opportunity. So stop giving your creativity away and take back the web. For designers. Visit wixstudio.com and designed the web the way it was meant to be. Number three, you gotta own the strategy. Don't wait for somebody else to hand it over to you. Okay. AI can generate 100 ideas and and lay out 10 different directions, even fake a strategy meeting. And to be fair, some of those strategy meetings might be more productive than half the ones I'm in on a regular basis. But the thing is, AI can't choose what's right for that brand in that moment with everything else that's going on. Sure, it can give you 50 logo concepts in two days, but it has no idea that the CEO hates circles and the market's shifting and the last brand failed because it was too playful. Or that the real problem is trust, not aesthetics. Strategy isn't about generating options. It's about knowing what should be an option in the first place. Number four, you need to become a filter. This one's kind of a big deal. AI can give you a ton of ideas and really fast, too, but most of the time, they're pretty bad. I mean, they might look good, but they're pretty bad. Your job isn't to generate 100 concepts for the customer. Your job is to eliminate 99 of the wrong ones. The designer who can look at a wall of concepts and say, that's the one, and here's why, is the person that becomes essential to a company's success. The value a designer brings is in explaining to the customer the difference between what looks good and what will actually work good for them. And last but not least, you need to sell your thinking, not your files. If a client hires you to create a logo, you'll be competing with AI Fiverr Canva. If a client hires you for your thinking, you're not competing with anybody. Look at your invoice. If it says logo design, 5,000 bucks, you're selling a file, a deliverable something that soon enough, a junior using AI can pump out all day long. But if your invoice says things, brand positioning, messaging, clarity, strategic direction. Yeah, I get it. It sounds a little fluffy, but that's the part that AI can't touch. That's the part that your customer actually needs. We had a customer once who had their internal designer create all these thin, superficial direct mail things. I mean, they looked okay, but there was like, zero strategy behind them. So they brought us a direct mail piece while this guy was out on vacation. And we reviewed the brief. We pushed back a little bit like we always do, but then we looked at the market, their customers, and we reframed it into something people actually would care about and read the response rate almost 10 times higher than the crap that they were creating internally. And was it just because we made it look better? Hell no. It was because we used the right messaging for their audience. Okay, if you sell your files, AI wins. If you sell your thinking, reasoning, intentional decisions, you win. End of story. Look, creative designers who just make things look good are gonna feel the AI squeeze. And a lot of them, they're gonna get replaced. I'm not being dramatic, and I'm not being an AI hype, bro. I'm just not lying to you. Every era weeds out those. Those who are hands on. I mean, scribes, paste up artists, film photographers, AI is just doing it faster. But real designers, the ones who solve problems, who can walk into chaos and sort the mess and find the answers, those are the ones who can actually understand what the hell the client is trying to achieve. And those designers, they don't get replaced. They get pulled into bigger opportunities. Because the future of design doesn't actually belong to those who can make something just look good. It belongs to those who can make sense of all the chaos around, makes sense of the problem. And that. That, my friends, is the designer AI can touch.