Being a designer used to feel like a career — now it just feels like a job

Being a designer used to feel like a career—now it just feels like a job

A look at how modern workflows stripped meaning from design, and why getting it back might mean breaking the very systems we built.

There’s an old saying, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Some dismiss this idea as nonsense, but for the majority of my career, I believed it — because that’s exactly how I felt.

In my nearly 20 years as a designer, I never once asked for a raise. I asked for more responsibility. Bigger problems. Harder challenges. Sometimes the pay came with it, and other times it didn’t — but that was never the point. The real reward wasn’t the paycheck—it was waking up every day excited to shape ideas and experiences.

In fact, the main reason I recently transitioned to a university professor is the fulfillment that comes from shaping how students think, question, and create. It’s certainly not the money — I make half what I earned in the corporate world — but the work feels meaningful in a way a paycheck can’t measure.

So why bring this up when discussing whether design still feels like a career? Because I’ve observed more and more designers becoming fixated on compensation — often framing it as a response to the rising cost of living or expanded responsibilities. Those are valid reasons, of course. But I suspect something deeper is at play — that compensation has become a proxy for the meaning the work no longer provides.

This shift didn’t happen overnight. Over the years, design moved from craft to process. As the work has grown more complex, automated, and less fulfilling, salary has become the stand-in for the value the work once held. Before this shift, I loved design enough that I didn’t count the hours or dread weekend work. However, over time, that feeling has faded.

When I started in 2006, design still had an edge. It was messy, unpredictable, and most importantly, experimental. The iPhone hadn’t launched. The App Store didn’t exist. Websites were just evolving into full-blown digital experiences. The rules were still being written, and you didn’t need permission.

Back then, it felt like the kind of work you could see yourself doing 10, 20, even 30 years down the road—a sustainable, lifelong career built on creativity.

It was chaotic, but the chaos had energy. It made you want to try things just to see if they worked. It made you feel like you were part of something being invented in real time.

Now, that energy feels gone. The work feels sanitized. Predictable. Automated. While at the same time making design as a career feel unpredictable, as if its future is no longer in the hands of those who practice it.

How did we get here?

Some reasons design as a career has declined are obvious—the economy’s a mess, layoffs are constant, burnout is high, and AI has gone from novelty to executioner. And the culture of work hasn’t shifted toward anything more thoughtful or human, but toward something colder, flatter, and more transactional.

Designers were once seen as creative experts — masters of thinking beyond the obvious. Now, we’re treated like interchangeable parts—input/output machines. Hand us the specs, and we’ll hand you the asset.

But the bigger issue — the one nobody really wants to talk about — is how we built the very systems that gutted the meaning from our work.

Over time, we stopped using tools to create things and started creating things to serve the tools. Design systems became the default — not because they inspired better work, but because they made it easier to manage.

They promised consistency, but what they actually offered was control. Not for us, but for the business. A way to standardize expression, reduce risk, and smooth out anything that might stand out or break the mold.

Frameworks like Design Thinking, Jobs-to-be-Done, and the Double Diamond were pitched as ways to bring structure to creativity — but in most organizations, they’ve become performance pieces. And I say this as a fan of some of these processes — they can be genuinely useful.

The problem is, they also give non-creatives a way to “manage” design without understanding what makes it meaningful in the first place. They reduce process to theater — something you can point to and say “we followed the steps,” regardless of whether anything truly worthwhile came out of it.

Templates are even worse. We don’t start with blank pages anymore. We start with pre-approved patterns and pre-defined layouts. Instead of asking, “What could this be?” we ask, “What’s the expected format?” That’s not design. That’s production. It’s compliance with a prettier name.

And then there’s AI — the enabler of vibe coding and frictionless products. It can generate layouts, copy, and entire systems in seconds. But what it saves in time, it often costs in craft. Just look at the Tea app.

Marketed as a women-only safety platform, it went viral — then collapsed after massive data breaches exposed 72,000 images and over a million messages. Now it’s facing lawsuits. Because the product wasn’t truly designed or engineered— it was cobbled together with AI along with a disregard for quality and judgment.

AI has turned design — and other once-creative responsibilities — into byproducts of prompting, stripping away the hope they could be meaningful careers.

This is what happens when prescribed aesthetics outrun integrity. When “good enough” replaces thoughtful decisions. Design used to mean something. Now it just means producing output.

The moment we started deluding ourselves

If designing the very systems and tools that would eventually strip design of its soul wasn’t bad enough, we also romanticized its role — deluding ourselves about what design could actually do.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe design can make a difference — like creating better experiences for a diverse range of users. But that’s always been both its job and its limit.

At some point, we started treating it like a powerful moral force — as if design alone could fix systems, change minds, solve inequity, and make the world better simply by existing.

And look, I get it. The idea that good design can change the world is comforting. It makes us feel important. But it also sets up a completely unrealistic expectation — one most designers eventually crash into when they realize the job isn’t about grand impact. It’s about moving buttons, tweaking interfaces, aligning to brand guidelines — and above all, driving profitability.

If you still believe design will end racism or hunger or war, I’d like to share a quote from Dr. Gregory House—“You’re an idiot.”

Design is powerful. But it’s not magic. And it’s certainly not a replacement for political will, social infrastructure, or leadership.

If you want to change the world, you’ll need more than Figma and good intentions. You’ll need influence. You’ll need vision. You’ll need the persistence to work within — and sometimes around — the systems in your way.

That might mean starting your own company, or at the very least, becoming self-aware enough to understand what you truly control and how to use it effectively. Spoiler—working at a FAANG company is not the shortcut to any of that.

And when those grand expectations collide with the daily reality of the job, what you’re left with isn’t bitterness — it’s disillusionment. A kind of quiet grief. The feeling of waking up one day and realizing that the thing you believed in has been hollowed out and turned into an Asana task list with 47 subtasks.

When I see designers asking for more money, more PTO, or more flexibility, I don’t see entitlement. I see people recalibrating. I see people grieving the distance between what they hoped design would be and what it’s actually become.

Some of the blame falls on designers — and on those who shape their perspectives—trusted influencers, publications, even institutions. There’s a willful ignorance at play, perhaps even a trace of fear, and a reluctance to critically examine the ideas being sold about design’s capabilities and responsibilities.

Terms like “ethical design” get tossed around as if their meaning is self-evident — which it isn’t. We lean on data and deductive reasoning as if people were robots rather than complex, unpredictable beings.

If anything, more needs to be done to give designers the critical thinking tools to courageously unpack and interrogate such complex ideas, rather than simply being told to accept them as truth.

How do we make design a career again?

If we want this work to matter again, we can’t sit around waiting for the industry to rediscover meaning. It won’t. Leadership won’t suddenly decide that curiosity is worth more than velocity, or that judgment is worth more than “on brand.” We have to reclaim it ourselves — not by torching everything in sight, but by staying awake inside the machine.

The truth is, most of the systems we work in weren’t built for creativity. They were built to control it — to make outcomes predictable, risks manageable, and output consistent. That doesn’t mean we can’t use them. It just means we have to stop pretending they’re neutral. Because they will quietly flatten your work if you let them.

Reclaiming design starts with the smallest possible acts of resistance. Defend a choice because it feels right, not because it ticks a box. Add something unexpected to a layout that otherwise runs on autopilot. Ask why a pattern exists before dropping it in. Take the extra beat to solve a problem in a way that excites you instead of defaulting to the safest option.

These moments don’t need to be grand gestures. They’re rarely noticed in a status update or a project brief. But they are the difference between design as a career and design as factory work. They keep your judgment sharp, your taste alive, and your sense of authorship intact.

And when it comes to compensation, we must ask ourselves — are we asking for more because the cost of living keeps climbing, because our responsibilities have grown, or because we’re trying to buy back a sense of joy we’ve lost in the work itself?

If we keep those instincts in play — even in a world of rigid systems, endless templates, and AI shortcuts — design can still be a place for genuine creativity. Lose them, and it becomes exactly what the industry seems to want it to be — just a job. Something that looks fine, ships fast, and is devoid of meaning or purpose.

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Being a designer used to feel like a career — now it just feels like a job was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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