What it’s like to be a designer at 40
Notes of a (maybe dirty, yet not so old) designer
Christmas has always been a boring and annoying time for me, ever since I was a child — sorry Mariah. But sometimes, amid all the commiseration, I try to counterbalance the festive displeasure by reflecting on deeper thoughts, almost like setting New Year’s resolutions.
I want to share what has bumped into my mind lately, though I’m not sure where all this lucubration will lead. To any soulmate out there who might feel the same, well, remember you’re not alone.
What it’s like to be a designer at 40
Last year, I stepped into a new decade of life — or as my friend Scotch puts it in his cool LA style, I reached Level 4, Chapter Zero. Aside from goals and growth on a personal level, dissected through therapy, I have also been wondering a lot about the future of my profession and the design environment.
I realized I’m approaching my 20th anniversary in this field, which sounds a bit strange to say. It even makes me wonder if it’s time for retirement — but I know, unfortunately, it’s not. It’s almost like when, at 33, I decided to give up my career in advertising to take a sabbatical year and then focus on digital interfaces: the urgency that something must change in one way or another and find a renovated spirit to go on.
Sometimes, when you are on those off days, you forget everything you have reached until now. After all, through ups and downs, I should remind myself I started doing the life I always wanted as a digital nomad. And even if I’m not moving as much as I planned, since after COVID the prices of rents went crazy all over Europe, I really cannot blame the lifestyle I achieved. Some may see me as a weirdo for these life choices, but not everyone understands what it’s like to live without roots.
I’ve also managed to find some kind of work-life balance, trying to avoid many overlapping projects or being involved in workflows that would have brought me to the umpteenth burndown. I turned down proposals resembling body rentals or collaborations that were offering junior-level pay. And it’s not arrogance, just an honest assessment of my worth, which I believe is crucial at this age: I know my qualities and strengths, and also my clients and collaborators recognize and appreciate them.
But things are gonna change so fast in the design field, and sometimes I worry about not feeling the same energy I had when I started at 22, nor the exact same excitement, though the passion and the commitment to create beautiful and useful things remain unchanged.
Usually, I’m not a huge fan of thinking about the future — in the end, what really matters to me is here and now — but these days I cannot help wondering how my profession is shaping in the upcoming years ahead, and I hope to stay curious and keep an eye on what is happening worldwide.
Is there anybody out there?
And while I look around, sometimes I wonder if it’s just my perception and I’m playing the role of a brooding, goth-like designer. But I sense a shift in the general mood, also among dear friends and longtime collaborators in this field: they feel the same confusion and lack of enthusiasm, making me believe it’s a reflection of the times we’re living in.
Over the past two years, I’ve had ideas for projects that I thought were interesting, but sadly none became reality. Sometimes it has been due to laziness or probably to some kind of depression. Other times the enthusiasm vanished as soon as I realized I was alone in these journeys, not finding anyone who shared the same beliefs to collaborate with. Even in the education business that I care so much about, I interviewed my ex-students, trying to imagine some solution to the rambling mediocrity I see online, but in the long term, it seems like nothing is feasible when practically there is already everything out there.
The information overload I wrote about some time ago has now reached its peak, and design got caught in this loop too, becoming just another cool subject for influencers on social media. The sheer volume of articles and posts is overwhelming, and there’s too much noise around. Everyone is shouting about the same things, without adding any interesting points of view or new perspectives on subjects. In the end, it’s so hard to find someone to admire, to paraphrase someone’s song.
That’s probably why my mind has somehow started to cope with all of this by shutting out to preserve itself, progressively reducing the time spent checking LinkedIn, Medium, and other social media. I can’t stand any more who enunciate misleading notions with embarrassing jargon and self-sufficiency, pontificating about what is right or wrong. Or those alleged Nostradamus who give certain tools or processes for dead, feeling as if they had jumped on some phantom bandwagon, just to publish some clickbait content. Despite all the delusions of protagonism, the essence of our job hasn’t changed and still has nothing to do with ego. So where exactly are we going now?
The future of digital design
A while ago, I was reading an interesting article by Jorge Arango about future roles for designers, and what surprised me the most was that the word “creativity” was never mentioned in the piece.
I found it curious, considering that this aspect has been what made me move my first steps as a designer: the ability to lateral think things and solve problems using not only logic and good sense but also imagination. But I recognize that, in the realm of UIs, inventiveness has been forgotten in the spur of usability and forced into the grip of absolute truths: products look pretty all much the same nowadays, and in this flattening mood the concept of “creativity” seems hard to find.
Back in the early 2000s, when I first started making websites, the world was quite different. As you may remember, there wasn’t even a specific job title for these skills, as before the advent of mobile apps we were all called just Web Designers. But those were exciting times, open to experimentation on all levels, though the possibilities were limited by technology and we made a lot of mistakes — forgetting accessibility, just to name one.
To AI or not to AI, that is the question
In all this chaos, the advent of AI has also been added to the mix. But while people are questioning the implications of copyrights and possible job losses, throwing industry insiders into a panic, there are some interesting facts about these tools that can reshape the job of designers as we know it.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned: I embarked on this AI journey quite late compared to other colleagues and in a quite listless mood. I felt like in the era of Macromedia Flash, when I always admired others using it but I personally never wanted to learn it. Time said that mine was a good intuition seeing how it ended, but I’m quite self-assured I won’t be that lucky this time and I fear I’m probably missing something.
One year ago I subscribed to a newsletter about AI’s releases, but I had to give up at a certain point. Every day there was a new product launch, and I started to feel the anxiety of not being able to keep up with everything. It took me some time, at the right pace, to explore some of these products, and test out their features and possibilities.
From what I’ve seen until now, AIs have lots of potential, mostly in simplifying workflows but not really stealing our jobs, at least not all of them. These tools can indeed speed up the process during the most boring and time-exhausting phases, giving us our time back to concentrate on those tasks where our value could really make a difference. If all this hype won’t translate into any real benefit in our lives, then we have probably messed up the equation.
But AIs, for what we know today, are still far from replacing the depth of human creativity: they take everything that has already been done in the past, twisting it in a new way — sometimes unexpectedly beautiful, others with doubtful results. True is that human creativity has always been a mixture of all the knowledge from the past we assimilated and grew with, but the key difference is that humans are not analytical like an electronic machine and the process involves also feelings, emotions, and empathy. After all, Artificial Intelligence is not as intelligent as we might think.
Specifically to UI Design, I feel like technology is still not quite there, but probably things will change soon. Maybe in the future, when a quantum computer is developed, an AI would be able to exactly replicate human thinking and make proper reasoning from scratch — and that would be scary for several ethical reasons, but also really fascinating. Maybe when that happens, we already won’t be designing interfaces anymore yet, at least not as we know them. Anyway, let’s not think too much ahead of our times, again. For now, it’s too early to either cry for the revolution of all times or live it with just reluctance.
Tech is not the problem, we are
Sometimes I try to have a conversation with ChatGPT about these subjects, not treating it like a machine, but rather like a human. Still, it bothers me a lot that it doesn’t have a sense of humor and keeps answering me with bullet points. Who knows, one day it will become the perfect imaginary soulmate like in a dystopian movie.
Speaking of technology and its impact on relationships, I recently stumbled upon an unexpected and funny parallel between Charles Bukowski and his computer. In the early ‘90s, he was gifted a Mac which led him to write poems in a more prolific way than he did before with a typewriter — much like AI could do for us today.
One of his poems, published posthumously in The Continual Condition (2009), reads like this:
Now it’s computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year-olds will have computers
and everybody will know everything
about everybody else
long before they meet them.
nobody will want to meet anybody
else ever again
and everybody will be
a recluse
like I am now.
Curiously, this poem is not an aversion towards computers and Bukowski wasn’t condemning the technology per se — he was just observing, with a pinch of sarcasm, how humans behave and inevitably isolate themselves.
I find it quite interesting how adherent these words are to today’s society and behaviors, even if it has been written more than 30 years ago, long before social media and digital overload consumed us. If technology really freed up our time, what would we use that time for? Would we still find human connections valuable or will become just more reclusive?
Twist your head around, it’s all around you
And while I’m here complaining of my middle-age crisis, as a cisgender white western male living in one of the world-power countries, I step away from the screen to see the whole picture, and I can’t ignore what’s happening outside my window.
The world is way bigger than our design bubble, where I and the useless LinkedIn posts of “which design is better” are infinitesimally small dots. I see a genocide, happening right in front of my eyes, and this time not in a school book. I remember that people have the power, yet I feel completely disarmed by the impotence of not being the architect of this common destiny. The older I get, the more I can’t stand the injustices in this world and how things became unequal.
I am sorry and repent with all my heart that in this consumeristic world, I live in a crystal ball where I am allowed to fill my head with things that are maybe superficial. Who am I to complain about this life and this job? Where is the real impact of what I create, when outside our digital sphere thousands of images are picturing dead children and people still starving for food? That’s when it hits me the absurd contrast between what I do and what probably really matters.
If only design could solve this turmoil we are living in. After all, as designers, we’ve always been told that our job is to make people’s lives better. But if there’s still meaning in what we do, it doesn’t lie in whatever tool, useless debate, or any illusion of progress while the real problems remain untouched.
It lies in the people we design for, in the problems — however small — we choose to solve, where we can find new lifeblood that would remind us that what we do is still worth something. Or maybe, in the end, we just deserve to have this world taken over by AIs one day, hoping, perhaps, that they’d do a better job than us.
Hello, I’m Pietro Gregorini, an Italian designer. I work as a freelance Art Director and Product Designer while teaching in design schools.
