A designer with 20+ years of experience sits in front of twelve competent, AI-generated screens... and can't evaluate a single one. Not because they're bad. Because something is missing. And the same thing happened to me.
In this episode, I investigate this case like a detective story: What was taken from us? Who took it? The answer turned out to be the most hopeful thing I've learned about design in years, disguised as a crisis. Because the comps were never the design. The comps are the artifact. The design is the model in your head, and no tool can generate it.
In this episode:
- The mystery: why the most trained design judgment goes offline in front of good AI output (and why "AI output is slop" is the wrong explanation)
- The three suspects: the AI, the speed, and the surprising real culprit
- Why "the back-and-forth builds the model": the experiment that proves your value was never in the pixels
- The cold case behind it all: how we spent 20 years selling the first three rounds, and why that gap just closed forever
- The stakes ladder: what happens when a designer, a team, or a whole organization over-trusts AI output
- Taste redefined: deciding, not decorating, and why having no opinion defaults to the average
- The open question: if artifacts are cheap, is the "living transcript" the design deliverable of the future?
- Your homework: five questions before pixels
Resources mentioned:
