There is no average work

Like many designers, I saw Figma launch AI features at Config this year — especially the magical button that turns a text prompt into a functional UI. It's like Midjourney, but for interfaces. And that feels scary since it's only going to get better from here.

Naturally, I wanted to answer it for myself. What happens next? When I interned briefly at a startup, I was frustrated when my manager would want to make all the design decisions. I thought she had no taste in design. But what annoyed me more was that she used Canva to design what she believed was better. What was my job then you ask? Filling in the flipping template.

Don't get me wrong: Canva is great. It's like a cheat-code for all founders, marketing people and everyone who's not a designer to design good-looking things. It makes people feel that they can design themselves — it empowers them to do more. And that is a terrific achievement on the part of Canva. But it also makes people think that there's no real need for graphic designers.

What Canva did to graphic design, Figma is doing to interface design. Templatisation. Pushing the average up and lowering the floor down. It was even more evident when Andy Allen pointed out that Figma AI was using real-world apps as templates to birth interfaces.

When the entry barrier is low and more 'decent-looking' designs flood the market, the bar for the average work goes higher. In the 1990s, designers used Photoshop to design interfaces and the entry barrier was high. It was a time when managers would just stick to managing things. And yet the designs looked like this.

My assumption is that this was good interface design back then. Over time, more and more of such designs started popping up. And today, designing something like this would be considered poor. But how come the same design fell from the peak into the crevice?

Obviously, some part of it is due to fading away of trends, evolving user needs and technological advancements. But undeniably, the bar for quality work is now higher. And whatever new features launch, this metamorphosis will be the only constant. As a result, there is nothing that can be called as average work since the average keeps climbing.

AI features in Figma will enable more people to design 'decent' stuff. It will also ruse them into undermining the value of a designer. And to be hireable in a market like that, designers will need to stand out more. It will be requisite to be good at the craft.

I learnt to design responsive grid layouts myself and it took an awful lot of time. Now, it takes less than a minute using the inbuilt UI kit in Figma. As convenient as it is, you miss out on learning the fundamentals if you only rely on UI kits to design. You'd go blank when you are faced with designing something even a lil different. That's why I'm not particularly fond of UI kits.

When the bar for quality is high and churning out templatised designs is easy, most designers who enter the market would find it tough. The secret is to get really good at your work, make efforts to stand out and keep looking up at the ceiling.