When Everyone Designs: How AI Is Lowering Barriers and Raising the Stakes
AI is collapsing the distance between concept and creation. Design is no longer just for designers. But that's ok.
Not so long ago, creating something well-designed be it a website or an app, a visual story like a movie etc… required years of study, practice, and mastery of complex tools. Designers were gatekeepers of quality because tools were hard, knowledge was deep, and creative skill was earned. I still remember when being able to draw something during a meeting was highly regarded.
That world is disappearing fast.
Today, AI is dissolving the barriers that once stood between an idea and its expression. Tools like Canva Magic Design, Framer AI, Runway Gen-3, Vero-3 and Adobe Firefly let anyone whether they have design training or not generate polished, often beautiful results. A prompt or a few clicks can now produce outputs that, even one year ago, would have required a professional designer.
AI is fundamentally reshaping who gets to create.
I do wonder, though, if we’ll start to see a shift where poorly designed (or more precisely, anti-designed) content begins to be celebrated. In a sea of slick, AI-polished visuals, there’s something raw and human about rough edges, imperfections, and low-fi aesthetics. We’ve seen this before: think of the rise of brutalist web design, zines, or hand-drawn visuals on social media. As AI-generated content floods every channel, will people gravitate toward work that feels deliberately unpolished, signalling human intent and authenticity? It’s an open question and I bet we’ll see this trend emerge.
What’s Driving the Change?
I’m guessing you know this already but…
AI lowers cognitive load: you don’t need to master Figma or Illustrator to design a website.
Conversational interfaces: you can simply describe what you want in natural language.
Context-aware tools: they fill in gaps, suggest layouts, correct mistakes.
Automation of repetitive tasks: freeing humans to focus on higher-level thinking.
Tool mastery is already no longer required to produce creative output.
The Big Shift: When Everyone Can Design
This democratization of design is powerful and disruptive. AI is making it possible for anyone to generate polished visuals, build websites, and create professional-looking outputs at the drop of a prompt.
We’re already seeing the effects of this:
An explosion of creative output: good, bad, and everything in between.
Suddenly, our world is filling with AI-generated content: websites, logos, videos, marketing materials. The volume is staggering and uneven. For every well-crafted project, there’s a flood of low-quality or derivative work. The signal-to-noise ratio is shifting, and designers will need to work harder to stand out.
Rising expectations: visual polish is becoming table stakes, even for small businesses and individuals.
Audiences are quickly adjusting their expectations. That small cafe around the corner’s design expectations just went up. Its social posts, menus, and website are now expected to look as good as a boutique agency’s work. Basic polish is no longer a differentiator but it’s assumed.
Commoditization of basic design work: simple websites, flyers, and templates are less valued.
As AI can handle more of these tasks, the market value of “basic” design work will decline. Why pay for something AI can do in minutes? Designers will need to rethink their offerings and start pushing into areas where human judgment, creativity, and emotional resonance matter most.
New roles that allow professional designers to continue to add value:
→ Moving up the value chain
Designers will increasingly focus on strategy, systems, brand thinking, and ethics. Basically all the areas where human creativity and judgment still outpace AI.
→ Acting as curators, editors, and taste-makers
AI can generate infinite options but not all of them are good. Designers will guide, refine, and curate outputs to ensure they align with brand, intent, and human values.
→ Designing with AI, not just for users
The designer’s role will evolve to include shaping AI behaviours:
Crafting prompt frameworks
Tuning model outputs
Designing AI personalities
Defining how AI interacts with users
As AI becomes an active participant in product experiences, designing the AI itself will be critical.
The most valuable designers will be those with deep taste, sharp judgment, and the ability to think systemically about both human and machine interaction.
Risks and Responsibilities
But with this new creative freedom come real risks: for individual designers, for businesses, and for culture at large.
Template-isation of creativity with too much sameness, too little originality.
When everyone uses the same AI tools, trained on the same datasets, prompted with the same instructions, results start to look and feel the same. A homogenised aesthetic can quickly take hold. Already we’re seeing a wave of websites, brand visuals, and social posts with that familiar “AI gloss.” The danger is a loss of originality, texture, and cultural diversity in design.
Flood of derivative content making it harder to stand out.
When AI makes it effortless to generate design at scale, the volume of content explodes. But more content doesn’t mean better content. The signal-to-noise ratio plummets. For creators, it’s getting harder to cut through. For audiences, it’s getting harder to find work that resonates.
Ethical blind spots like deepfakes, misuse, biased AI outputs.
AI tools can easily be used to generate misleading, manipulative, or outright false content. Deepfakes, fake ads, and deceptive visuals are no longer niche concerns but they are part of the mainstream digital landscape. In addition, AI systems reflect the biases in their training data. Without intentional oversight, they can perpetuate stereotypes, exclude marginalised voices, and reinforce systemic inequities. Designers have a critical role to play in spotting these risks and advocating for responsible use.
Loss of design literacy with fewer people learning core principles.
As AI handles more of the mechanics of design (like layout, typography, colour harmony etc…) fewer people will learn the foundational skills that underpin great design. Without understanding composition, contrast, hierarchy, or accessibility, creators risk producing work that is visually shallow or unusable for diverse audiences. The craft of design could erode if we become over-reliant on automated tools.
AI makes creation easy but meaning, intent, and ethics still demand human craft.
A New Creative Landscape
For professional designers, the path forward is to adapt, evolve, and lead.
It means we can’t sit back and hope to ride out the AI wave. We need to be hands-on with these tools, proactive in guiding how they’re used, and vocal about the standards we want to uphold. Most of all, we need to cultivate deep taste, ethical judgement, and system-level thinking, all the qualities that AI can’t easily replicate. If we lean into this, not only will our roles remain essential but they’ll become more valuable than ever.
Embrace AI: learn the tools, understand their strengths and limitations, and shape their outputs with discernment.
Elevate your role: move beyond execution to focus on strategy, storytelling, systems thinking, and the deeper human experience behind the work.
Stay curious: get under the hood of these systems. Know how they work, where they break, and how to use them wisely.
Teach others: as AI empowers more non-designers to create, designers have a vital role in mentoring, guiding quality, and embedding ethics into practice.
For organisations, this means embracing a more participatory, iterative creative culture while recognising that the role of expert designers won’t disappear. It will evolve, becoming even more essential as a source of vision, taste, and ethical guidance.