There were never as many design jobs as you thought
Mon, 22 Jun 2026
The refrain I keep hearing and seeing online from people in the last week or so is some form of:
They never cared about quality and now they don't have to pay for someone who does. You should stop trying to compete on the basis of doing quality work.
(I don't think anyone actually said "on the basis of" just in the interest of full disclosure.) Think about that for a second. This is basically a call to give up but in the dumbest way possible. Let's break it down!
"They never cared about quality"
This is absolutely true for a large segment of people who hire designers, I won't argue against that. Anyone who has worked in this business long enough has run into one of the many people who was grudgingly paying someone to do a thing they needed but didn't value.
"now they don't have to pay for someone who does."
I guess? I mean they are still paying, even for the AI stuff. This could also be about the wage destruction from outsourcing to countries with lower wages (e.g Fiver and Freelance.com) Even before genAI and self-serve outsourcing platforms there were a lot of options for paying way less to get the design you wanted without having to deal with a pesky professional who was going to whine at you about doing "good work."
Stock photography is for people who need a photo but don't want to deal with a photographer. Clip art is for people who need an illustration but don't want to deal with an illustrator. And while Squarespace has some very nicely designed website templates, they have many competitors that don't but charge less and let you have a web site without having to deal with web designers and developers, just like Squarespace. This is not new, this is just how industrialization works. Enough people want something and eventually someone decides it is an opportunity, and they find a way to turn it into a factory. (This is not a knock against any of the people making stock photos or clip art or reusable website templates. Get your bag.)
"You should stop trying to compete on the basis of doing quality work."
What?!? No!! This is a truly insane place to land. This is like "A implies B, therefore A implies cheese" logic. It doesn't even make sense, unless you don't know what you're talking about (which I suspect most of the people giving this "advice" don't)
If it was true that everyone just wanted slop all along and now they can get it without having to deal with the people who "gate-kept" (people keep using that word...) the ability to make things, then every designer, writer, artist, and everyone else on the long list of "people with skills that people with all the money never learned" would be out of work. Tens or hundreds of millions of people globally. It wouldn't be subtle.
I just witnessed, first-hand, a company cut all its designers as a cost-savings measure because they followed this now widely available really bad advice. I guarantee you, if you still have a job making stuff it's because there is someone in the chain between you and the P&L spreadsheets who realizes quality is valuable. Don't make them regret holding that opinion.
Lets talk about the recent history of digital design as a job
We'll do this by way of me telling a story about myself, isn't blogging great? I am incredibly lucky to have been born when I was, and I didn't realize it when I was just starting out my career. I am an "elder millennial"(thanks for that internet, I'm barely middle aged and yet also now an "elder") I missed all the hard scrabble days of the personal computing revolution, aka the 1980s and the first few years of the 90s (I mean, I existed, I was just a little kid.) The World Wide Web was just starting to become an exciting thing when I was a teenager. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. I had a front row seat to the upheaval the web caused while being young enough to not realize how it was impacting how things "had always been done" so I just got to learn how to do things now that the web was here. And then it happened again in the late 00s, when I was in my 20s, with the smartphone "revolution" and the app-i-fication of everything. (it would go on to happen again on an even shorter interval with the rise of "The cloud" and "big data" and SaaS, but that's not really relevant other than to acknowledge the pattern and the shortening cycle time.) And you may be thinking "That's great, Tony, I'm really happy for you. What does this have to do with what you were talking about in the first section?" I'll tell you, I'm lucky because this taught me an important lesson early in my career: there were never as many design jobs as you thought.
When I was 17 I started a web design company because my girlfriend's mom ran a department at a local university and she needed a website, had almost no budget, and knew a kid who was spending a lot of time building websites when he wasn't playing with his band or hanging out with her daughter (me, i was the kid.) I went on to make a decent amount of money (for a teenager) selling websites to adults in my very small network of people in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio (a city that was in the last stages of dying as its mostly industrial economy built around NCR and GM was being gutted in the name of shareholder value)
I turned that into a steady stream of web design and development jobs as I meandered through college for seven years. Even at 22 getting paid $1500 (about $2650 today) to custom design and build a website every other month was amazing, although not enough to keep me from having to have another part-time job. I was gonna be a web designer for my career, because I already was one. I just needed to find either a steady stream of work or a company who wanted to hire me full-time (hence the meandering through college, I didn't think I needed a degree to do a job I was already doing, all the people who offered steady pay and health insurance disagreed.)
Reader, you may notice that I am not a professional web designer today. That's not how I describe myself, it's not the work I do, and while I still primarily work with the web as my medium, I'm usually working on applications that just happen to be built on the web tech stack and have very little in common with the kinds of websites I was getting paid to design and build from 1999 to 2011. (RIP Flash) There is a very simple, good reason for that: there weren't as many web design jobs as I thought there were.
How many jobs are there?
I keep talking about there not being as many jobs as there appear to be, while also telling you I spent almost 12 years doing them. That may not make a lot of sense but hear me out. What I'm really talking about is how many jobs there are for the real demand for a given type of work.
At the beginning of the rise of the commercial internet and the World Wide Web, there appeared to be a lot of demand for people to make websites. As the Dot Com bubble grew, that demand also appeared to grow. But most of those jobs weren't real, in the sense that they would disappear as soon as the hype did.(and they did, in 2000) But also, a chunk of them would disappear as soon as someone figured out how to build a factory to give people what they really wanted. Someone like Squarespace.
Just like with Ned Ludd and his textile workers, the creation of a factory puts a lot of skilled workers out of a job by reducing the amount of skill (and therefore cost) required to make a thing. In the case of the website factory, a much smaller group of designers design templates for the customers to fill in the blanks themselves and have a website. (oversimplification) The demand for doing that thing outside the factory drops wildly. With the exception of a small number of people who will pay a premium to have an "artisan" type worker do the job for them, a lot of people weren't really all the interested in having a custom website.
And that's because design is one of many markets full of...
People who want a thing & People who are forced to need a thing
For the first 9ish years, all of my clients had one thing in common: they needed a website, but they didn't really want one. What?!? They bought a website, how could they not want one? A lot of them, especially in '99 to around 2004 or so, would literally say things like "I don't know why, but everyone tells me I need a website for my business" in our initial meeting. This was the "I don't want to be left behind" of the rise of the web.
(This happened again with apps in the early 2010s, and also "big data" a few years later. Having an app to collect lots of data so you could have "big data" but not know why was the first.. lets call it "artificial circular need" I remember Big Tech convincing most businesses they had, fwiw)
Even after it became clear why they needed a website, these folks still approached it as one of those annoying things you have to do as part of running your own small business. They weren't excited about their websites (this does not mean they didn't have a lot of ideas and STRONG opinions about their websites, they very much did.) The other strong signal that they didn't really want a website was that they were paying me, on average, about $14/hr($24.62 today) to design and build them one. It was not a lot of money. Most were paying me about $1000 to design and build these sites. I wasn't hosting them (I couldn't afford to invest in the servers you needed to do that back then). I was just handing them a zip disk or CD-ROM with their website code and all the assets at the end of the deal. A lot of times I'd manage to get an extra $100 to upload the files to their web host for them, usually a web host I helped them pick out as part of that $100 fee.
The point is, they were not spending a lot of money on these sites. To them, this wasn't a big investment in their business; it was an annoying marketing thing they had to do. In hindsight, it's no surprise that as soon as someone like Squarespace came along in 2010 offering a DIY thing that was way faster and cost about the same, a huge chunk of my clientele disappeared. (at that point my freelance clients had become moonlighting clients because I had lucked into a full-time job that paid so little that I was still taking projects on the side to make my student loan payments for that degree that was required to get the job that didn't pay enough to make the student loan payments)
At the time I was pissed! I needed that money! I realize now that they were never really customers looking for design, they were satisficing and doing it as cheaply as they could get away with because they didn't really want to be spending that money in the first place.
For them, the launch of the website factory was a good thing. Most weren't actually using their websites. A lot of them complained they didn't know what the website was even for. They successfully ran their business without them for years, and mostly didn't change anything about how they ran their business after I had built them one. It was a great deal for them, they could spend about the same amount of money, have one of their employees type all the words and upload the photos they used to give to me, and in a day or so they had a website. No rounds of revisions. No having to listen to the designer explain that blinking marquee text was not a good move, or that uploading blurry photos they had taken with their cheap point-and-shoot digital camera was going to be a problem. All the "hassle" gone. The cost, about the same. The result, not as good, but faster. Most importantly they were getting what they actually wanted. There were never as many website design jobs as we thought, we were just doing good-enough until they could build a factory to give these people what they really wanted.
We're at the end of another cycle
I just spend 1600 words talking about the rise and fall of my (and many others') website design career, but today in 2026 things are different... except they're not. At least not different enough to change the outcome.
Just like websites, we're nearing the end of the "Everyone needs an app!" era. We've managed to sustain this one longer (because the main money maker is providing cloud computing infrastructure) but it is very similar in shape and smell. No, this isn't about "AI making apps irrelevant" or whatever some guy trying to hype up his AI startup is telling you (or a number of large news organizations that really should dig a bit deeper on this stuff.) GenAI is a sideshow to this main event. An attempt to try and prolong this era by building a different type of factory, but we already have the app factory and we have for years. It looks a little different than the website factory, but that's mostly because apps are more complicated than websites.
The app factory is all the frameworks, "best practices", and super focused tool-based training (bootcamps) for designers and engineers that has led to most apps looking and behaving the same and being built on very similar tech stacks. We have systematically replaced the requirement of having a lot of the knowledge and skills that you used to need to make an app with knowing how to use a few specific tools that make a lot of those choices for you while you follow those "best practices." This inevitably led to the pay for these jobs going down or the number of responsibilities going up. ( sometimes both. What did you think "the cost of development has gotten much cheaper" actually meant? They were talking about your wages.)
I'm not gonna lie, it's hard for me in this moment to say "this is a good thing actually", the way I now talk about website design. We're in the middle of this and a lot of us have lost a lot as these "efficiencies are realized." It certainly doesn't help that we have a giant group of managers now cheering on the dream of mass unemployment for those of us who make things for a living as they attempt to build a cheaper to run app factory.
What I do know is, just like last time, there weren't as many app (UX) design jobs as we thought there were.
This is not a reason to give up
There are still companies today, in the year 2026, that make custom websites for businesses and sustain a staff of people doing so. There were always people who wanted a website. It just turned out there weren't as many of them as we thought at the height of the hype around the World Wide Web.
Likewise, there are still people who want good apps. More than ever, the people yearn for good apps! All you have to do is talk to literally anybody who isn't trying to get a VC to invest in them to hear about all the software in their lives that is worse now than it was three years ago. There are companies out there trying to make software that works for people, and that people actually love.
Unlike with the website era, I don't know that there is another era of computing that starts this cycle over again after this current one ends. It's not "AI", that is just an attempt to make a better app factory (that can also be other types of factories.) If there isn't another boom cycle, if software just becomes a normal business instead of a hypergrowth business, that might actually be a great thing.
I don't know if it is nostalgia or accurate analysis, but the times in recent computer history people are most positive about are when the web was full of lots of small sites and when there were a lot of small native desktop and mobile apps to choose from. People are already trying to use the things we've learned to "re-wild the web." There's no reason to think that after the AI shovel-ware era ends, there won't be a lot of opportunity working on smaller projects that people actually love, even if they don't make a hundred billion dollars. Remember, even though there weren't as many of a specific type of design jobs as we thought in past booms, there were always different design jobs we just didn't realize were there all along.
Odds and Ends
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