When Everyone Designs, Who Needs Designers?
The democratization of design is here, and that’s a good thing for designers.
I read last week in Fast Company that Canva, the template-based platform for designing just about anything from social media posts to e-books, was named a Most Innovative Company of 2022. The article documents Canva’s meteoric rise over the last decade. It’s now a $40 billion company and according to them, over 85% of the world’s 500 largest use their product.
Previously, design was for designers.
Canva’s idea is simple: design is for everyone.
This movement can be seen everywhere in design and other creative fields. Figma is free, web-based software that anyone can use to explore UI/UX design. Low-cost 3D modeling software and 3D printing is making hardware design accessible. Photo and video editing, once the domain of high-end professional software, is built into almost every content app that you can think of.
It’s easy for us designers to turn our noses up at these trends.
“I went to Design school”
“That’s not real Design”
But this new reality is one that we have to reckon with. There is clearly a massive market for fast, cheap, accessible design. And I think it is both a challenge and a net positive to professional designers. There will be more demand and appreciation for good design, but we’ll need to hold ourselves to high standards for quality and innovation.
Photography used to be the exclusive realm of highly skilled professionals.
Cellphone cameras have now made photography a ubiquitous part of modern daily life, with image quality that approaches that of DSLR cameras. More images are taken and shared per minute now than were taken in entire decades when photography began.
Photographers have not become irrelevant. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the employment of photographers to grow 17% from 2020 to 2030. I suspect this is because everyone now has exposure and daily experience with photography.
You might be OK taking your daily Instagram pics with your cellphone, but when it comes to your wedding you’re going to hire a professional. You get a sense for how much skill and technique there is actually involved with taking a good photo. Your daily experience gives you an appreciation for the craft. It informs what you like and you’ll be willing to pay more to get it.
The same thing is happening with design. Over the last ten years, design has been woven into the daily lives of the general public (thanks to the work of designers!) and this led to a new baseline for aesthetics and usability. With this came an explosion in the use of daily design tools like Canva. This isn’t a threat to professional designers, it’s a gateway to increased demand.
“Before we had a 1,000 companies that wanted design, and only 100 who could afford it. Now we have 1 million companies that want design, and 800,000 who can afford it.”
Tobias Van Schneider
As the baseline for design rises, the appreciation and business demand for the top-level design will also grow.
As another design blogger, Tobias van Schneider, writes on this topic, “Before we had a 1,000 companies that wanted design, and only 100 who could afford it. Now we have 1 million companies that want design, and 800,000 who can afford it.”
When someone has some exposure and daily experience with your craft, they’re more likely to be able to appreciate it and want to invest in you as a creative. And while some of the new “design-for-everyone” tools like Canva do take away the need for a designer on lower-level design tasks, is that the kind of design work you’d want to be doing anyway?
Canva knows that they’re not going to replace professional designers. It just spares them from having to be the art department, as mentioned in the Fast Company article: "The creatives learn that Canva can actually save them from having to make small, irksome changes to things like templates for business cards and sales decks. They can just hand that power over to businesses. Canva makes this argument repeatedly: It’s not out to replace designers and their specialized tools, but to work alongside them.”
The challenge for us as designers then is to stay on top of our craft and to keep producing fresh, high-quality work. Be the logical next step for design needs that outgrow the use of democratized design tools. Be the pinnacle of the craft that clients aspire to work with.
The client that’s using Canva wasn’t going to hire you for their first project anyway, but now that they have a sense of what design is and what they like, they’re ready to upgrade and work with the best.
In the design-is-for-everyone world, it will be harder to compete on commodity-level design, but the best designers are going to see more, not less demand.