What’s the Future for Designers?
It was December 2012, -22°C (-8°F) outside. I was sitting in my new office, after splitting our design shop with my long time partner. Some joy of fresh start. And lots of anxiety about the future. At the time a bigger part of our revenue came from newspaper design, print/ad design. Roughly at the same time platforms to hire freelancers anywhere in the world were gaining traction (99designs, Fiverr, Elance, oDesk). And by anywhere I mean competition now comes from India, the Philippines, and other countries with relatively cheap workforce.
5 years on. June, it’s +22°C (+72°F) outside. We’ve switched competently to digital, UI and UX design. I’ve used platforms mentioned above, but as a client, not as a service provider. Fears did not materialize, and the future seems quite bright.
What I’ve learned so far — meaningful design is pretty hard to outsource. A large part of the work must be done in constant collaboration with the client and development team. So being close to them is a huge advantage. At the same time there is growing recognition for the value of good design, hence the demand for designers. That is constantly mentioned in trend reports each year. Design companies are acquired as never before, designers come as co-founders more and more often. Design thinking is the new cool. More on this: https://goo.gl/0Jizo8
But I did not realize the scale of the shift until I’ve read that: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/31/here-are-some-reasons-behind-techs-design-shortage/ IBM has increased their designer to developer ratio from 1:72 in 2012, to 1:8. And they are not alone. In Atlassian (company on top of BitBucket and Jira) this ratio changed from 1:25 in 2012 to 1:9 in 2017. And the list goes on.
That is a very nice trend to watch. And I’m quite confident — the near future for designers is wonderful. Small changes happen constantly — Sketch changes Photoshop. New Javascript framework is born each week. As for the longer-term — some big and (yet unknown) changes inevitably will happen. Something will die as newspapers died. Something new will emerge. Nothing to worry about — embrace the change and design ;).
