In between came the web, interactive television and the phone in your pocket, and each one arrived with the same announcement: the old way is over, the people who did it are done. Each time the tools died. The job did not.

I am writing this for the clients I work with in Jersey and the UK, because the same worry is doing the rounds again, and I have some form on this.

Learning with your eyes and hands

I started at the drawing board. Airbrushes, Rotring pens, Letraset, scalpels. Then desktop publishing arrived and it was arguably the biggest shift graphic design has ever had. The tools I had trained on went in a drawer within a couple of years.

What I miss is not the kit. It is the teaching that came with it: the fundamentals of graphic design and typography, learned slowly, with your eyes and your hands. You cannot unlearn that. Everything I have done since sits on top of it, and it is the first thing I would tell anyone starting out now: learn the fundamentals, whatever draws the grid.

A brochure on the telly

In 1994 I hand-coded my first website. I am from South London, so my professional reaction was roughly “oh my days”.

It was for Hunting PLC, a defence company with a head office on Trafalgar Square. I remember the view from the boardroom and thinking the internet might catch on. The second site was for Jiffi Condoms, whose strapline was “Come in a Jiffy”. Not every client gives you a line like that.

Nobody quite knew what the web was. To me it was a brochure on the telly, and that was the revolution: you could correct a spelling mistake, or change the offer, without paying for a reprint. I saw it as a promotional tool to enhance a company’s brand. Thirty years on, for most businesses, that is still exactly what it is.

The set top box

In the early 2000s I designed interactive TV ordering for Domino’s Pizza. You browsed the menu with a remote control, built your order, and it turned up in thirty minutes. No card details to type in, because your billing and delivery details were already held with your TV subscription. It was the first delivery system in the world to do that. It won Best Use of Interactive TV two years running.

The set top box was the worst piece of hardware I have ever worked with. And within a few years the whole platform had gone.

That is the lesson people miss about platform shifts. Some of them do not last. Interactive TV was ground-breaking and then it was over, and the work was still worth doing, because everything I learned about ordering from a sofa with five buttons went straight into the next thing.

The one I got wrong

I should say what I missed, because everyone misses something.

Crypto. My friends were on it and I should have listened. In fairness, when NFTs came along I did not see a future in non fungus tokens, or whatever they were called, and I stand by that one. But the wider point is that I was slow on the whole phase, and being early on mobile does not make you right about everything.

What has never changed

The fundamentals. Type, space, hierarchy, the grid. They were true on the drawing board and they are true today; the tools evolved around them.

And one more thing, which for me is the whole job: the look on a client’s face when you unveil the work. It was the same for an airbrush illustration, a brochure and a website. It will be the same for whatever comes next.

Where AI fits

AI does not change design. There is a lot of nonsense and a lot of fear around it, so let me be plain about how it works here.

AI is a tool that we direct. We brief it, review what comes back, direct again, review again, in a loop until it is right. That loop is the job. When you see what people call AI slop, you are looking at a lazy human, not a clever machine. Put the same tool in the hands of an expert and something different happens: you stop cutting corners. The things that used to get squeezed by budget and time get done properly.

Yes, this is the AI era. It is also just a tool that helps you do what you love, better.

What I actually do with it

Design systems. That is where I see the real value, and this website runs on one.

Think of a design system as a brand and style guide that lives: colours, type, components and the rules for using them, in code, used every day. Compare that with the expensive printed brand guidelines that sit in a drawer and never get opened again. AI makes building and maintaining a living system practical for businesses that could never have justified one before. Design systems for all, not just for companies with a fifty-person product team.

This website is the proof. The initial build took two weeks, working with AI on top of a design system I directed. But a website is not just for Christmas, and I have been tinkering with it ever since, which is exactly how a living system is supposed to work.

None of that has replaced the older tools. Creativity comes from vision, and I still enjoy bringing that vision alive with a pencil and paper first. Adobe still plays its part. Photoshop is the great survivor: I started on version 3 and we are now on version 27.

Tools get replaced

The headlines say Figma is dead. That is a personal view, and sadly I agree with it. Figma is a good design tool. It was never my favourite, but people love it, and that is fine.

I loved the original Xara. Then Corel got hold of it and it was never the same. That is what happens to tools, including the ones you like. I have lost airbrushes, Letraset, a set top box and Xara, and I expect to lose things I love. That’s life. Wake up.

Your passion for design is the thing that should always shine through. The tool is just the tool.

To anyone worried about their job

That is the real question clients ask me, and I understand it.

Six platform shifts, and there are more people working in design and digital now than at any point in that time. Every shift felt like the end. Every one of them was a retooling and a learning curve. This one is the same.