AI’s Impact on Entry-Level Designers: A Crisis in the Making
Think for a minute about the typical tasks given to entry-level designers: repetitive assignments, production work, implementing designs in different applications, creating presentations, applying a brand identity that you didn’t create, designing a friend’s wedding save-the-date card, and more. These are the tasks that expose you to various aspects of the profession—the "bring it on" and “say yes” modes, where no design task feels too small, and you have enough hunger to take on anything. These are the first times you meet a client, receive a design review, make design decisions, and hover your cursor nervously over the save and export button.
Personally, I believe that the first two years are the most important for a designer. They help you identify your strengths and the areas you need to improve, provide perspective, shape your professional personality, and develop a thick skin—one of the most vital traits for any creator. Ideally, these first two years should be spent at an agency. There, the learning opportunities are optimal: diverse briefs, close art direction, and exposure to many aspects of the profession. I genuinely believe that once you enter tech, there’s almost no turning back. If you go straight into a tech company from design school, you’ll never become as strong a designer as you could have been if you’d first spent time at an agency. And yes, I do come from a big SaaS company.
But I’m not naive. Over the past few years, I’ve hired dozens of designers straight out of school. For the organization, it’s priceless—I’ll explain that later. But for the designer, I think there’s a downside, even at a company that supports juniors and recognizes their immense value.
When I ran my agency, I hired designers straight out of school. I refined the training and design process and found ways to retain them as long as possible. Yet, naturally, after two to four years, they left for tech. Many of them I later met at Wix . Early on, when my first employees started leaving for tech companies, I was angry and hurt. I was a young business owner, highly invested in people, and I saw them as true friends. But as the agency matured (and as I did too), I realized that’s just how things work. Today, my perspective has done a 180°
A few years ago, I spoke with a colleague who runs a leading agency, and we joked about this exact issue. He told me that when his first designers left for Wix over 11 years ago, he bought shares of the company, and he’s done the same with every public company his employees have joined since. Over the years, he’s made quite a bit of money this way—a creative and profitable way to still reap some benefits.
This long introduction is meant to highlight a troubling fact: AI is, to a large extent, making entry-level design jobs obsolete. Un needed. This is already happening. Most of the tasks I mentioned in the first paragraph can now be done excellently by AI tools—and if they can’t yet, they will by the time you finish reading this. Remember how, ten years ago, the ultimate nightmare was cutting out a model’s hair in Photoshop? Damn, I remember how whenever a curly-haired model showed up on shoot day, every designer in the room started sweating. We spent gazillions of design hours on hair masking — usually handed off to junior designers. Today? Background removal is a one-click job.
This is a specific case affecting a particular seniority level, but due to the nature of that level (entry level designers) , it’s a domino that could fall and significantly impact the entire profession. We can’t afford for that domino to drop. If studios and companies no longer need very junior designers and instead prefer hiring mid-level professionals, we’ll end up with a cohort of lost designers. Over the next two to three years, until the dust settles, the profession adapts, and the industry adjusts, design school graduates may find themselves without entry-level design jobs. That alone is shocking. Designers might abandon the field, and who could blame them?
But the more concerning effect will come in a few years when there won’t be a mid-level design group as we know it today. Designers with three to six years of experience, who are essentially the driving engine of the industry, will be missing.
What will agencies and companies do then? They might hire senior designers for mid-level roles or, alternatively, juniors who haven’t gone through proper training and development.
Am I being dramatic and overly pessimistic? Maybe. But I truly feel this shift coming. I believe it’s the responsibility of design leaders and academia to not to look away at this time. Instead, they must opt to create mechanisms that ensure sustainable growth for the profession: more internship programs in companies, accelerated training tracks, peripheral angles to the profession, concentrated design tasks at scale (such as model training), and more. This is not just an ethical responsibility but also a professional one. Those who fail to manage this situation now will find themselves with an unbalanced and unhealthy design organization in the coming years.
The design community cannot remain indifferent, and indeed, towards the end of 2024, voices began emerging in various design circles about the responsibility that design leaders must take to create opportunities for juniors, like Vahan Hovhannisyan beautifully described at his article “The future of junior designer’s role”
“ No industry has ever benefited from crises affecting junior talent. Entry-level specialists are essential not only for handling foundational tasks but also for bringing fresh perspectives to businesses. Now, more than ever, we need this new outlook on design and products.”
One of the most interesting approaches, which we are also trying to implement in our organization, is equipping them with immediate tools for working with AI. This will be the first generation of designers to work in a hybrid design manner—we don’t yet fully know what that will look like, but we want this generation of designers to have an active role in shaping it.