The Hill
I didn’t get into design to build a great product, or solve a world-warping problem.
I remember opening up Illustrator for the first time in 6th grade, to finish my assignment of retracing Bart Simpson with the pen tool. Thus, the routine begins: Finish an assignment, learn a new tool. Finish a big project, learn a new program.
It wasn’t the magic of “solving user problems” or “changing the world with design thinking” that brought me this passion, but having to struggle, to deal with the extremely clunky UX of Adobe products, to suffer through the utter, hopeless feeling of incompetency.
My goal, for the longest time, was to become the best Adobe Illustrator master in the entire world.
I never thought that there was a designer at Adobe whose entire job was to optimize usability for these programs. To me, it was an enormous hill to climb over — being good at Illustrator was the only way to bring my vision to life. It doesn’t matter that there are easier ways to do things. It was the soul-crushing, inevitable need to improve that woke me up every day.
Craft Has No Excuses
This mindset followed me to CMU. Most first years at the School of Design have to take a design class and a drawing class. Forty of us ground night and day, working on useless projects like drawing leaves and making cardboard models. Most of the grind did not have an immediate effect. Out of the hundreds and thousands of things I produced, most of them did not make me more passionate or notably better at all. However, they taught me something more than the projects themselves: that craft has no excuses. If the work isn’t good, it is not the tool’s fault. The grind is simply the path to getting better.
Then, somewhere along the way, the logic flipped. Figma rose as the new norm — grids, deformers, pixel-based measurement, components, auto-layout, variables, and everything became faster, easier, and better for communication designers. Suddenly, everyone understood. These design tools came down to our level; we no longer had to rise to their complexity. It wasn’t the designer’s fault that they did not know how to use noise, Gaussian blur, or the pen tool; it was the program’s fault that it wasn’t obvious enough.
People built plugins to make our lives easier. Entire products formed around the parts that Figma was bad at. Designers’ expectations grew. Instead of spending hours digging through tutorials and manuals, we started to look around for the next product, the next workflow optimizer. Complexity was no longer marketable. Out went Origami, After Effects, and Photoshop. In came ProtoPie, Jitter, and FigJam. Companies’ expectations grew. More tools on the job description, more skills to learn, more shoes to fill.
In Came AI
In the midst of all of this, came AI.
There is no need to explain what happens next. Claude Code became the norm. Figma turned old school. Illustrator barely gets mentioned outside traditional graphic design circles.
None of this is a tragedy, exactly. The cost of execution fell to the floor. More people are designing than ever before, and companies pour real resources into it. On the surface, everything points upward. But I can’t shake a chilling, subtle dismay.
Imagine asking an artist, “Your work is really cool — which brand of pencil did you use?” Or a musician, “Do you think the piano is dead? Everyone uses DAWs now.” Absurd, right? But that’s what’s happening to design. I haven’t heard anyone say “typeface,” “kerning,” or “hierarchy” in three months. All replaced by “AI,” “MCP,” and “skills.” We talk endlessly about how we make things, and seldom about whether the things we make are good.
The Climbing Itself
Somewhere along the way, we started believing that tools were the achievement. AI made everyone forget about the hill; becoming a great designer was never about what you used to climb it, but the climbing itself. Yes. It is faster to iterate with Claude subagents in Paper.design. Or ship directly to production without needing any high-fidelity Figma mockups. But faster does not mean better. The only way to become better is to learn the foundations, grind, and improve gradually.
That is why, despite all the new tools, I still prefer to pixel-push every screen, every component, every interaction. Slowly and painfully, like a sculptor with a chisel.
Because to me, design has never been about the results. It is simply for the love of the game.