Throughout my career I’ve ridden waves of technological change, not just one quick blast of learning. New designers need to know that understanding the design journey takes time. This is what bootcamps can’t teach.
As you get started, how you respond to changes in technology determines your growth as a designer. Adapt and ride the waves of change.
What are the waves I’ve been a part of so far?
Print design
I started back when print design was having its last gasps of dominance, the internet was taking over. I was busy churning out print designs for a DVD production company, but I knew it wouldn’t last. Today, clipping paths are done instantly by AI, but back then it was all by hand.
An opportunity came to design and help develop the company website (their first one!) and I jumped at the chance. When new tech comes, embrace it. That one decision changed the course of my entire career, and it’s ultimately what got me into UX and web development.
My tools were the Adobe Creative Suite and high resolution scans of photographs that then had to be retouched to be suitable for printing.
Web design was booming
Then, as a web designer and, later, a UX Designer, I made sure I was good at HTML and CSS, and I began learning JavaScript via the jQuery library (it’s a good abstraction of the core concepts of JS). This helped me design for the web, specifically. I avoided designing for print like I had been doing before, mainly because they are different media.
The code of a web page informed my design choices. It’s s series of boxes, so how could I make that limitation more informative and more interesting without being outrageously out of touch?
Web applications
In the past 10-15 years app frameworks like React and Angular have come along to help developers build applications faster. They use HTML, CSS and JS but take them to the next level – components. These components are independent of each other which makes them very fast and flexible.
These components have given rise to design systems which through Atomic Design (Brad Frost) help designers create interfaces and workflows that are standardised rather than random. To build new workflows you need to make new combinations of those components.
It’s during this period of my career that I very seldom use images, mostly icon fonts and text and CSS styling when before the image was king!
And now AI…
I’m skipping over blockchain because it’s actually not ready yet for general use, it’s just too slow. Blockchain will be great for legal transactions that require security and transparency at the same time.
AI has just as much hype as blockchain with a big difference – it’s really useful! So how can you use AI to inform your design? It’s actually the culmination of 60-70 years of work, so it’s merely the next wave in a series of advancements; not the harbinger of doom some make it out to be.
AI can make every person at a company more productive. It is a source of ideas and a great starting point for a leap forward on any project if you use it as leverage. Be careful not to give it the reins just yet, though, or you might just crash into a stop sign. 🙂
How to start in UX in 2025
Recognise the latest technological trends and think about how you will design for them. For AI how can we do more than just a chat bot? Apply your Design Thinking and empathy to come up with a myriad of answers to this question.
Don’t be afraid, it’s just technology.