Elizabeth Goodspeed on why graphic designers can’t stop joking about hating their jobs

Illustrator Karlotta Freier recalls being mocked by her art school classmates for asking about how to make a living as an illustrator. “No one would make fun of a plumbing student for asking about the business side of things,” she says, “so why don’t I get to ask?” For decades, the promise of a creative career was the alleviation of the worst parts

AI will reduce today’s design jobs. This I feel strongly.

The value of many design jobs today is in visual translation. Someone has a picture in mind of what they want and hires a designer to make that picture real.

If that person can instead feed in a text file into an AI tool and say:  Show me a bunch of webpage option

So many of those who dedicate their careers to creativity have, like many of us, been motivated by a sometimes unconscious desire to reconcile the various contradictions of our era: between utility and transcendence, a yearning for greatness and a belief in the dignity of the everyday, between the work available and the work we want to do.

But who are we — am I — trying to be original for? Myself, a client, a boss, a professor, Instagram, my mom, nobody at all? I think that it’s time to really think about who we’re creating for, so that we can strategize who deserves our originality, who deserves our efficiency, who deserves both, and who deserves neither. If there’s one thing I