Design is free
How design is trending in the 21st century and what to do about it.
With the advent of digital distribution/commodification, automation, and reorganization, the tactical aspects of design (wireframes, icons, screen creation) are getting cheaper all the time, in some cases approaching free.
The definition of design that I like to use is that “one could describe design as a plan for the arrangement of elements to accomplish a particular purpose.” from Ray Eames (pictured) and Charles Eames. By this definition, everything is designed, from chairs, to cities, to government policies.
“The truth is, everything is designed, but there is a spectrum of design from the simple / tactical to the complex / strategic.”
Whether you agree with this or not, I describe design in terms of its complexity because the simple/tactical things that can be designed are what I mean when I say free. A chair, with so many reference designs and understandable constraints is a tactical design. A person must be able to sit on it, it can work in our dining room or at our desks. Sometimes it is upholstered or it has a back or armrests. With a very simple set of tools, you can design and build a chair on your own.
Design at the strategic level is a great deal more complex and the constraints aren’t always known. I point to governments and governmental policy as examples of a system that although has been designed, isn’t an easy thing to design. To understand how a government implements a healthcare system or how it deals with infrastructure are massively complex issues.
I use the following model developed by Stefanie Di Russo while a PhD student in Australia to help describe tactical to strategic design. At the lowest level of the model are the tactical designs…the objects that we design like the chair. But as we move up the pyramid, we see that things get a good deal more complex. These are the strategic aspects of design and go from discrete products, to services involving multiple touch-points, to systems which involve clusters of touch-points, multiple services, hundreds of products and countless human interactions.
At the tactical level in addition to a chair, you can design a t-shirt or a logo, or a website. When I talk about design being free, those are the kinds of things that I’m talking about. The costs to design this level of work are dropping precipitously towards free.
TOWARDS FREE
There are three main drivers lowering the costs of tactical design:
- Digital Distribution has led to the commodification of certain aspects of tactical design to the degree that many artifacts are distributed in bulk at greatly reduced costs than previously available or free as a sort of open source design.
- Automation has algorithms procedurally creating tactical designs. A near future could be that a designer merely enters a series of parameters and whole sites or apps are created, tested, and presented back to the team.
- Reorganization of companies and the work being done describe a combination of globalization, off-shoring, in-housing, and democratization of tactical design work.
1. DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION (COMMODITIZATION)
A really good example of digital distribution is recorded music. I was born in 1969 when music was mostly available on vinyl records. The first vinyl album that I stole from my sister was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles and in the ’70s and 80s I started my own collection. It got to be about a couple of hundred albums. Then I bought cassettes and had several hundred of those. I don’t want to talk about the amount of money I’ve wasted over the course of my life on these hard media buys. It was a lot.
This chart describes, essentially, the rise and fall of each of these media. It shows the precipitous fall of the recording industry, and what’s going on with distribution. CD’s or Compact Discs as a technological advance was a visible money maker according to the chart above and probably represented huge sales to the recording industry. But as you can see, people stopped buying CDs. I’d built up a collection of something like 300. Noticing a pattern? At a certain point I sat and I just ripped them all into iTunes in maybe 2002. It took a solid couple of weeks.
Digital blindsided the industry. The chart suggests that the rise was lower than that of CDs but shorter in duration. They were simply unprepared for it. With digital distribution, you could borrow songs from friends, steal the music with Napster, and later buy them from Apple.
Apple, with iTunes saved the recording industry for a little while but things have changed again. At this point, the “industry” has shifted to digital distribution of music through Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, Google and others.
In the above example, the music industry underwent a radical economic shifts because of the digital nature of the artifacts it distributed. The ease with which music could be moved since it was removed from hard media to digital distribution upended the model. The same is true of news, and numerous other industries and design is not immune to digital distribution.
ICONS
At frog Design in the mid-2000s, there was a great designer named Matt. Whenever a project needed icons, we’d go to Matt because in addition to his other skills, he was great icon designer.
With the sheer number of free or licensable icon sets out in the world today, it would be a waste of time to assign a designer like Matt to develop custom icons. There are icon sets for a relatively de minimis amount of money. If you’re going to be designing and developing your own design system and you’re a large company with a well-known brand, you might want to develop your own icons. If you’re a smaller company or a start-up, it’s easy to grab a set of existing icons. You should be considering a design system but don’t add custom icons to the list of things to be done. Icons have become a digital commodity.
FONTS / TYPEFACES
I very much appreciate the skill involved and the beauty of a well-designed typeface. Typography is the backbone of graphic design. A simple search reveals thousands of fonts to choose from and thousands of free fonts. The costs here, even for a licensed set, really only becomes high at scale. If you use the font at a large company or across a large number of sites, this is where it becomes expensive depending on the contract you negotiate with a font house. If you are small site or company, the costs are low. Fonts are a digital commodity.
DESIGN SOFTWARE
I used to design exclusively with the Adobe tools and for years there was no alternative. But recently, there have been a number of tools that have appeared that change the equation. Sketch is one of them. Not only is it a less expensive tool, but it’s custom-built to produce digital products AND it allows third-party plugins, many of which are themselves, free.
Adobe is still a great company and they’ve produced Adobe XD to essentially compete with Sketch but it costs $9.99 a month. Sketch is $99 a year. An important thing to note is how much the Adobe Creative suite used to cost. You’d buy a set of Adobe software in the $800 dollar range. Cheaper today and possibly free tomorrow. Tool costs are approaching free.
SITE DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
Squarespace is a tool to build custom websites with numerous choices of pre-built themes. All you need to get started is an idea and some content. Something I used to have to build by hand, manually, over months of time, has eliminated the costs of that effort. If I’m building something for myself, it’s free. Their business model is to provide a core set of services for free where add-on services or scale is where costs reside. Site development software is a commodity.
DESIGN SYSTEMS
Material is the design language from Google, but also a Design System. It has everything you’d need to create a product and is a one stop shop for design. It’s just as much of a “product” for Google as Gmail or search…and just like those tools, it’s free.
Design Systems are a critical aspect of modern software development and it’s likely your company is using one or more to develop your products. A Design System is like a set of a templates and LEGO pieces for your team to make them more efficient by reducing the cost of development. If you’re a startup by all means go grab Material and focus on your products usage, rather than what a button looks like. If you’re a larger organization, again, you likely have your own or several design systems in place. As a team, your focus is on designing a product AND designing the system but both are strategic and once made, the tactical decisions become fewer. Design systems like Material make the basic components of your development efforts free.
GOOD, FAST, OR CHEAP: PICK TWO?
Free fonts and icons have become a commodity, design software has come way down in price, and development tools allow you to create your own websites.
Until recently you had to pick two from the diagram above. If you said, “Good and fast.” then it wasn’t going to be cheap. If you said, “I want it cheap and fast” then you weren’t going to get something good. This is no longer completely true. Now, because of the reduced costs of tactical design, you can get a product out the door that’s a combination of the three.
The commoditization through digital distribution has greatly reduced the cost of tactical design.
2. AUTOMATION
Automation is also coming. Design isn’t immune, it would be shortsighted to think that it wouldn’t hit design. The following information available from McKinsey suggests that the biggest job loss to automation will be for people who perform lower level cognitive tasks. But it doesn’t account for the rapid rate of technology in the very specific area of design. Nor does it take into account what I’ve described as the tactical aspects of design. When it talks about demand growing for socio-emotional, creative, technological, and higher cognitive skills…take note as we’ll come back to that later.
“Within 60 percent of jobs, at least 30 percent of activities could be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. What lies ahead is not a sudden robot takeover but a period of ongoing, and perhaps accelerated, change in how work is organized and the mix of jobs in the economy. Even as some jobs decline, the US economy will continue to create others — and technologies themselves will give rise to new occupations. All workers will need to adapt as machines take over routine and some physical tasks and as demand grows for work involving socio-emotional, creative, technological, and higher cognitive skills. The largest occupational categories in the US economy have the highest potential displacement rates.”
US jobs displaced in midpoint adoption scenario by 2030, millions of full-time equivalents:
The news isn’t all bad but the following examples of automation in “creative fields” should be noted and examined.
THE GRID
Earlier I gave the example of Squarespace which enables people to manually create websites and is a lot easier than creating the HTML from scratch. The promise of this tool is The Grid. If you’ve not heard of this, The Grid which seems to be in relative limbo at the moment, is a tool where you upload your content and it spits back out the design of a site for you. I can imagine a number of possibilities where an AI examines hundreds of different website or applications and provides your designer several choices that will work. The designer would then just pick from a list of possible solutions, press another button to automatically A/B test their choices, and choose the one that does the best. Easy. Automatic. Even more compelling is the technology from Airbnb — Sketching Interfaces. Through algorithms, Airbnb trained a system to recognize 150 shapes comprising its design system such that if the tool was pointed at a whiteboard, the sketch could result in an interface.
‘I AM AI’
Taryn Southern released an album called “I am AI.” A lot of the work that was done to develop the album leveraged technologies like Watson, Amper Music, Google’s Magenta, and AIVA, and these tools were the record producers and composers. So what were formerly high skilled jobs, were outsourced to an AI. In David Byrnes book, ‘How Music Works’ he spends a lot of time talking about the technology of the music and how it’s had a huge affect on the industry. Multi-track recording for instance. Just as the music industry has changed with digital distribution, so too has the music itself changed. Taryn sings and she wrote the lyrics, so humans aren’t being completely pushed out of the effort but it was produced by technology. It’s also not a bad album, take a listen to Break Free.
LOOKA
To demonstrate another aspect of automation I found a tool called Looka to see if it could design a logo for me. I can’t really say that the quality is super awesome, but I gave it some parameters like my tagline, and some aesthetic guidance, chose some colors and hit ‘Go’. This is what it gave back to me.
The designs remind me of the early days of desktop publishing. Back when the Mac first came out and through the introduction of digital type, postscript, early graphics software, and laser printing…you could do your own designs. Its actually an earlier example of automation where very manual tools of design were made digital. Instead of putting graphic designers out of business it opened new possibilities for both those designers willing to engage the new technologies and a boatload of others willing to jump in and experiment. For someone just starting up a business, these would work just fine. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1995, the logo was terrible and didn’t start to evolve until much later. In 2000 the smile (from A to Z) arrived. So if you’re a startup, you can use these automated tools to help you.
While we’re talking about logos, here’s another example from MIT Lab a few years ago (they’ve since rebranded) where the logo has been designed and programed to represent numerous variations. They’re all recognizable within the visual structure of the original but an algorithm created the variations.
AUTODESK
This is a partition that was done with generative design by Autodesk. By generative design, they basically set an algorithm up and trained the tool with dimensions, strength requirements, and other details. Autodesk put their software to work and made this. They made it without a designer or an engineer. The AI spit out hundreds of different designs, and they ended up choosing this one. What was once a manually designed object, has been handed off to automation.
SKETCH2CODE
Creating wireframes had been a staple of the tactical activities of an interaction designer for my whole career. Tools like Sketch2Code are removing this step from the process.
The good news is that according to this HBR article the need for social and emotional skills, including initiative taking leadership, will rise. That’s a really important thing. Creativity is also going to be highly in demand. The question is how you apply that creativity. Demand for advanced technological skills such as coding is going to rise by 55% in 2030. If you code, or are a computational designer, as Jon Maeda describes, you’re going to be safe for a time. But retraining is a huge imperative so that a focus on the tactical aspects of design, while important to know, are less important in the future than the strategic skills of design and the “soft” skills of writing, communication, presenting, and collaboration. More on this later.
3. Reorganization
The last big driver of the trend towards free tactical design is actually several things that I’ve grouped into a category I call reorganization. As companies and organizations evolve in the 21st century they will face a number of changes that could have a tremendous effect on design:
- Outsourcing while not new, has a new aspect to it — the gig economy as applied to design
- In-housing is about bringing design into an organization in numerous ways. It speaks volumes about the success of design
- Democratization is the idea that not only are we all designers (itself a contentious idea), but it’s no longer reasonable to have a team of white, male designers only. Frankly it never was, but now that we’re aware of it, it needs correction.
OUTSOURCING
Traditionally, outsourcing design meant an organization hired a design agency for their design work for a variety of reasons. Sometimes an organization didn’t have design at all, or they didn’t have enough to address all their needs. Often an agency is brought it to address a complicated design. Today, we have a new aspect of outsourcing. The gig economy will address design needs in a very different way than we have seen before and the following services are already decreasing the cost of design.
There are numerous design services that serve as essentially the gig economy for design. Above is 99designs, but there’s also Upwork, Fivver, Toptal, and others. I can go to these services and engage a number of talented individuals at a lower cost than a full time hire. There’s plenty of them, and they’re happy to do it. The costs are a lot less than what I might pay, for instance, in San Francisco, for the same people. The gig economy where freelancers do single jobs as an alternative to working for a company as a full time employee is growing although it has numerous flaws. I’m not going to argue over its merits, but I will say that these services make it more and more possible to find people to do the work that formerly, a much smaller number of people could do. It also contains an amount of risk. Design services are a great deal more complicated and require a sharper eye on the work being produced.
IN-HOUSING
Companies are both buying small design companies and hiring designers at a rapid clip. The following chart describes how a number of companies have essentially bought design for themselves.
What you’ll see in this chart is the companies listed on the left were prominent in the acquisition of design firms. The numbers suggest that this was a growing trend and the data examined is a small fraction of all companies…but influential nonetheless. This can be positive for you if you own or work in an agency.
The companies listed are progressive and on a leading edge of a more major trend. Larger, less digitally savvy incumbents are going to follow suit. Digital transformations include building the capability of design as a part of the greater effort and a fast track to gaining design capability is to purchase it.
DEMOCRATIZATION
Here’s another set of stats. As far as diversity goes. We don’t do a good job in tech or in Design of being inclusive of folks who are not like us. Google is 60% white and 31% Asian, and then they lump 9% for everybody else. Where is the African American community? What about Latinx? LGBT? People who are differently abled? This lack of diversity not only adversely affects the products that get built that don’t account for women or people of color, but by locking out whole segments of the population, the costs of design are higher. If only a few people get to practice design, they’re going to charge more.
In China there are currently 17 million designers. Design schools in China are training a half a million designers a year. What does this mean for design in the rest of the world? Supply and demand would suggest that costs will decline.
45% of designers are female, but they often don’t have leadership roles in the organizations that they’re in. That sucks.
Carolyn Davidson was paid $35 for the Nike logo, originally. They recognized her eventually, but originally Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, gave her $35 bucks. The Nike logo is iconic. It’s one of the most recognizable symbols on the planet. Conversely, when Paul Rand was brought in by Steve Jobs to design the NeXT logo he was paid $100,000. One might argue that Carolyn Davidson wasn’t a famous designer like Paul Rand. Maybe. At the time, there were a lot fewer famous female designers to choose from but not zero and data would likely suggest that the majority of female designers were (and still are) paid less than their male counterparts.
When we get more diversity, when we bring more folks into design and into development and into some of these tech companies, we’re going to have an even greater number of people, which adds to the supply of designers, thus reducing the cost.
“All women, men and children are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design. For design is basic to all humanity”
Victor Papanek believed that to design is human. When we used to run around in tribes of 150 people on the savannah you would make your own tools, your own clothes, and you would build your shelter. The evidence of your design was much more apparent. As society grew and our tribes got larger it became possible to specialize, but even today if your intent is to solve a problem (from our definition by Ray and Charles Eames earlier) and because we live in a world where everything is designed, then you a designer.
That everyone is a designer is terrifying for those traditionally calling themselves designers. But should stop worrying because while we’re all designers, we’re not all great designers and just as everything is designed, not everything is well designed. There’s plenty of room for improvement.
GOOD NEWS
One of the things that you notice when you start to look at off-shoring or the use of all these free and wonderful tools is what Alan Cooper calls “the invasion of the lightweights.” The cost reductions of the templates and icons makes it affordable for a person to put some screens together that appears to be a UI, because the tools have made it LOOK polished. Templates and icons used by people who know how to use the tools and are able to put together something that looks like it’s functional and looks like it works — doesn’t mean what they’ve created is usable or a reasonable interaction.
So the strategic aspects of design…the real thinking that needs to go into modalities, states and interactions. The flow from screen to screen — through an on-boarding or other transaction, requires some skill and knowledge.
The tactical work is dropping in cost but the thinking behind the work remains costly. The nature of the work is evolving but everything evolves. Tools, Interfaces, systems, companies, and societies all evolve.
As designers, we need to evolve alongside the technology and look ahead for a future where our skills are still very much in demand, but will look very different from the ones we have now.
Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell designed Pong in 1972. We played on our TV and it was super fun. The interface was extremely low resolution and the gameplay was simple. Today we have games that are fast approaching a near-perfect resolution to reality. The game image above from 2015 is almost indistinguishable from a photograph and the animations and video are getting more realistic every day.
If everything evolves why should design be any different? The tactical work is approaching free through a combination of digital distribution, commoditization, and automation. But again, there’s good news here.
THE DATA SUGGESTS THAT GOOD DESIGN IS GOOD BUSINESS
Design is in demand. Google, Amazon and Facebook are all still acquisitive, and many other organizations are following suit. Friends in venture capital tell me that founders don’t show up without a designer co-founder. Why? Because design is good business. McKinsey and Invision have proved it.
Companies with top-quartile McKinsey Design scores outperformed industry-benchmark growth by as much as two to one
McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over a five-year period in multiple countries and industries. Their senior business and design leaders were interviewed or surveyed. The McKinsey team collected more than two million pieces of financial data and recorded more than 100,000 design actions. Invision’s report found that companies with high design maturity see cost savings, revenue gains, and brand and market position improvements as a result of their design efforts. Prior to McKinsey and Invision’s reports, I’d leveraged the Design Management Institutes’ Design Value Index to support the argument that design is good business for years prior to the McKinsey data. Armed with this new data, we know that businesses are more aware about how Design can help their business. This again is good news. It means demand for design in corporations is on the rise.
OK, BUT WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU’RE A DESIGNER?
Specifically, what can we do? First of all, don’t panic. There’s opportunity in a crisis. I strongly encourage you to:
- Read — read voraciously. Read anything you can get your hands on. Read books and articles on your industry, but also read material from outside your domain. Your abilities as a designer are fostered by your innate pattern recognition and a great way to see patterns is to expose your mind to the myriad of ideas out in the world. Because design is so broad, there’s so much that is potentially applicable. An article on fly fishing could apply to a design workshop. A book on botany could help you discuss the ontology of your information architecture. Automation tools will replace the tactical work you do but not the cognitive. Not yet anyway. While others are just getting into the field, your ability to increase your knowledge and skills by reading far surpasses theirs.
- Learn — learn about the business that your company does. Learn everything you can about it. It’s insufficient in today’s economy to passively stand by your ability to design, but not to really and truly understand the organization you work for and its goals. Talk to people in your org. Treat the effort to learn like user research. Learn the financial aspects of the business. What drives revenue? Growth? Efficiency? Learn what your colleagues are doing and why.
- Research — If you’re not already doing user research, start. If you are doing it, do it more. Bend over backward to learn what the users of the things you’re building want and why. How can you align the goals of your org to users needs? And by all means do qualitative user research, but get some quantitative data to back up your assumptions. Tell the story of your users but try and back it up with quantitative data. I disagree with an organization being data-driven as I would prefer that they’re data-informed, but the latter is true of many companies and knowing this truth will make you a more strategic designer.
- Soft Skills — Look. The term “Soft Skills” is abhorrent to me. It suggests that the skills listed are in opposition to “Hard Skills” (in your case: design skills) but soft skills are hard. Particularly egregious is that among the seven common soft skills is communication, and when a term is mis-labeled through laziness as soft skills were, this is poor communication. Irony at its finest. The seven soft skills are:
Leadership — Learn to lead. One doesn’t have to be a manager to lead, anyone can do it. Lead a project, lead an initiative. Lead from behind. Leaders are less susceptible to the fact that the tactical skills are approaching free.
Teamwork — Play well with others and get really good at teamwork. Teamwork doesn’t just mean doing the work, it means supporting the others on your team to do the best job they can.
Communication means learning to write, present, speak…communicate. Learn to convey the great idea in your head in other than a beautiful design. Nothing sells itself, even the right answer. You must tell others. You must convince them.
Problem Solving is part of your job but know that not all the problems that need solving are user interface problems. Sometimes the problems are about workflow, or seating, or that desks need to be cleaned off after a day of work. No job is too small. If you see a problem, solve it. It is insufficient to merely identify a problem. Bring the problem but bring three solutions along with it.
Work Ethic — Work hard. I don’t need to explain this.
Flexibility- falling on your sword is exhausting. Get over it. Dogma is for zealots…and zealots aren’t any fun. Following a design system is a great rule of thumb but be flexible enough to know when breaking that system will help move an effort forward.
Interpersonal Skills aren’t easy for some people. For instance, if you judge someone to be difficult to work with, ok. But if you judge several people to be difficult to work with, you might actually be the person who’s difficult. Be amiable, congenial and careful. Your goal is to get the work done, but if you’re difficult to get along with or insensitive, you’ll have more of a problem. Don’t be an asshole. - Embrace diversity — diversity will initially increase the number of designers and therefore drive the costs of design down. However, in the long run, we will have better design with more diverse teams. Before you get hired, ask how about the makeup of the team you’re being hired into. Are there enough women? People of color? Is the team gender neutral? Does your team have disabled people? If all of us stood up and spoke for inclusion, we’d have more of it. Your silence is complicity in a system that alienates. Speak up and give diversity a great big hug.
- Think systemically — Work on designing something larger than just an app or a website. Understand that what you design doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Expand your thought about how your company or organization addresses the other aspects of the product they deliver. Push to design past the screens you stare at and into the breadth of experiences that surround the product you’re working on or if you are working on a part of a service, find out about the other parts of the service. What else do users need to be successful using the tools you’ve focused on and how can you design a greater breadth of the service.
Now go out and design and thanks for your time.
