Toolmageddon

Unbeknownst to many outside the design community, every day there's a new design tool with a random word-generated name, promising to change everything. The toothpaste aisle in the supermarket has fewer options and less aggressive packaging.

It's an exciting time, sure, but most designers are quietly drowning in it. Overwhelmed by choice, trying every new thing, not really getting deep enough to understand how it can help, just anxious that if they don't understand it, they'll get left behind.

Here's what I know: execution is probably only 25% of what I do. Always has been. The tools that handle it are getting faster and more intelligent by the month. Fine, but that was never really the hardest part.

What worries me is the designers entering the industry now, reaching straight for the tools and skipping everything that comes before them. You can see it in the work. Visuals that look like the last thing a prompt spat out. Technically proficient. Strategically empty. And because the tools are new, everyone's an expert. It takes about four clicks and a prompt to get certified. I've been using Photoshop for at least 20 years and I don't know nearly enough about it to be certified.

I call myself a "Brand designer, specialising in logo and visual identity design", which is accurate, but surface level. It doesn't say much about the discovery process, the research, the strategic thinking, the foundation-laying that happens before a pencil ever touches paper. The details in the blueprints before the house is built. That's the work that makes a difference. It's always been there. It just hasn't felt as urgent to talk about before. It does now.

To the new founders and business owners reading this. Ask the designer about their process. Make sure they're asking you the right questions, and questions you'd never have thought of, before they deliver anything. The work before the work is where the value is. That's the path to standing out.

Strategy before style. Discovery before design.

Image created in gemini. Edited and upscaled in photoshop