Don't give up on craft so quickly
Mon, 15 Jun 2026
If you listen to a lot of "design leaders" recently, you may have heard something along the lines of "too many designers are too focused on craft" and instead they should focus on... whatever it is they're selling (everyone is selling something, including me, it's not always a bad thing it's just something to keep in mind.) This call has only gotten louder as we roll deeper and deeper into this era where companies are trying to replace people with GenAI tools (either by laying them off or just not expanding teams that are drowning in a ton of new work.) I think this call is coming from a good place, everyone is afraid of being replaced, but it is misguided. If you're more anxious these days about how to do the work, and how to keep getting paid or how to break into getting paid, the worst thing you can do is stop focusing on craft. Let's talk about why.
What even is craft, anyway?
Part of this rise in scolding designers (and to a lesser extent engineers) about being "too focused on craft" is a fundamental misunderstanding of what "craft" actually is. Whenever you hear people talking about "Designers these days are too focused on craft" what they seem to be trying to say is "Designers today are too focused on tools and outputs." Too focused on "making stuff." That is true! Don't just take it from me, I've talked to a bunch of design leaders and recruiters in the last few months and all of them talk about how at nearly all levels of seniority, their people and their prospective hires are too focused on tools and artifacts. But here's the problem: that isn't what craft is.
"Craft", short for "Craftsmanship" (not to be confused with "craft" being skilled in deception... isn't English fun?!) is not about tools and outputs. It is about doing your work well and skillfully. In our modern times we often also call this being a professional. Yes, the word "craft" is old and generally described people who were working with their hands, but those specific jobs are not important to the concept of craft. The definition is literally "skill in an occupation or trade." It's the doing your thing well enough that other people want to pay you for it part that is most important. Now more than ever, you should be focused on doing things with the highest level of craftsmanship possible.
If you, like me, went to an art school that based it's curriculum on The New Bauhaus, you very likely got a "craft" grade on every thing you turned in. What was that grade about? It was about making sure your work was presented professionally. No sloppy cuts on the matte board your work was pasted to. No weird smudges or fingerprints on the work itself, etc. But not just "making stuff with your hands" things got craft grades. My videos and animations got craft grades on having vanity cards at the start and credits at the end, things I did 100% on the computer.
In school, craft was about showing up and presenting yourself and your work like the professional they were training you to be. Out in the workforce, craft is about being that professional you are. It's what distinguishes you, someone with skills that required training and practice to get to a level where you can charge money for them, from someone who makes a Squarespace website on the weekend about a hobby they do.
In an age of slop, strategy alone won't save you
Designers LOOOOOOVE to talk about how into strategy we are. We're "strategic thinkers" who are using "strategic empathy" to craft customer pleasing "UX strategy." That last sentence is not much of an exaggeration from some of the things I've seen written in job descriptions in the last three months. Most importantly, the "design leaders" will tell you that "strategy" is what you should be prioritizing over craft. (Fun fact: a few business cycles ago it was business skills, and farther back it was tech skills. If you wonder where the great "should designers code?" debate came from, it was "design leaders" telling designers they were focused on the wrong things.) So, what is strategy? It's a specific plan that lays out how you will go about achieving some goal. Being strategic is the opposite of just YOLOing it once someone tells you what you're supposed to be doing.
Most people (especially in tech) are not a strategic as they claim to be on LinkedIn. More importantly: strategies, like ideas, are a dime a dozen and pretty much worthless if you can't execute them. (convincing people to go along with you is part of execution, using your ability to fire them and deprive them of reliable access to food and healthcare is not.) Everyone has five different ideas about how the team should go about working toward its goals, if you aren't aware of this you aren't talking to enough people.
Sure, some strategies are better than others, but the reality of the modern workplace is that it is often the person with the most power who gets to decide the strategy, not the person with the best strategy. And while that sucks for a variety of reasons, it's often harmless because you can overcome a mediocre strategy with excellent execution, as long as your goals are right. It turns out, when your business is selling software to people how good the software is matters to the people paying for it a whole lot more that whatever the plan was to go about making it.(This applies to more than software.) (Some of you may argue enterprise software disproves this but even enterprise buyers will give up on bad software they aren't directly using when it produces enough problems.)
This is more true than ever in the era where anyone with an idea can pay an (increasingly rising) fee and have an LLM spit out a good enough version of it. If craft didn't matter, it would be game over for all of us designers and engineers, because the LLM has very low level of craft and is faster at deploying it than any human. All you need is a strategy and a credit card!
Except, if you talk to almost anyone who isn't an aspiring VC, you quickly learn that low craft things are not popular. People are not excited about paying for them. Big companies that have mandated the use of genAI tools for their employees are even starting to question the value of their output. If craft wasn't that important, none of this would be happening. Despite the cries on social media of "They never cared about quality and now they don't have to pay for it" that I keep seeing, low quality things aren't making money (except for monopolies like Google and Microsoft.) If craft didn't matter you, me, and everyone else who does what we do would be out of a job and the era of "Dude with an idea but no skills to implement it starts billion dollar business" would be upon us (and no, that hasn't already happened)
Craft is what people are buying from designers
A lot of people think when they hire a designer they're getting someone to come up with a lot of "creative" ideas, or someone who is really good at drawing and painting. There are a lot of people, who are not professional designers, that come up with "creative" ideas or who are amazing visual artists. Add to this the parade of marketing managers, product managers, and a whole lot of other people with the word "manager" in their titles who have been happy to show up with a "concept" to share with the design team that is a high-rez Photoshop mock-up or coded prototype (well before the invention of the LLMs) that very clearly took them hours to make, and you would be kidding yourself if you actually believed that the thing the professional designers did was focusing on the tools and cranking out artifacts. If those were the things that mattered, nobody would hire us, they'd just let one of those whatever managers draw their mockups and build their prototypes and call it good enough, and the engineering team would never "run out of tickets." (This is, in fact, the world the AI boosters are trying to sell, and it is nonsense.)
But people are hiring designers, even as some of us (like yours truly) are laid off because some people think the LLM can replace what they were paying for (they can't, and they usually find out quickly). Even if they don't know it what they're actually paying you for is your craft. Your ability to do the job like a professional. Your ability to sweat the details because you know which details will lead to bad outcomes. Your ability to convince people to go along with your ideas, not just have them. The whatever managers with the hottest "AI" cannot do that and they never will be able to without spending the time you and I spent to develop those skills. They are amateur designers, it's only through months and years of practice and learning that they could hope to develop the level of professional skills, the craft, you have.
Without a high level of craft, you are replaceable. (no, "taste" is not something anyone is paying for. Please just stop.) If you give up on it to focus on something else, you quickly stop being a professional designer, and then you're competing with all the other amateur designers that work at your company.
Odds and Ends
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