08-06-2026SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE

Design is on its deathbed. Long live design!

The history of design is a story of constant reinvention. Will the AI era really be any different?

At the beginning of the summer, Figma, the popular design platform, hosted a funeral for design. “Come pay your respects,” the company posted on X, inviting visitors to a pop-up on Rivington Street in New York City. Attendees found a site adorned with funereal flower arrangements and received black hats that read “Design Is Dead.” On Instagram, the company posted, “we mourn design—killed, according to X, approximately 847 times this year alone.” 

The pop-up, part of a larger advertising campaign from Figma, came (at least in part) as a response to Claude Design, Anthropic’s new tool for creating visuals from presentation slides to interface prototypes. Before the release, Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, resigned from Figma’s board, putting the two companies on a collision course. (Anthropic’s launch prompted a temporary 7% decrease in Figma’s market cap.)

The “Is this the end” narrative has followed Figma, now considered an incumbent in the design tooling world, since its 2025 initial public offering. Despite 48% year-over-year revenue growth, its stock is still down roughly 80% from its all-time high, underscoring the uncertainty around how designers will work—and with what tools—in the AI era.

Design has always been a strangely insecure profession, and Figma’s tongue-in-cheek response tapped directly into the uncertainty around what the future of design looks like.

The existential dread started in earnest in 2021 when OpenAI launched DALL-E, an image generator that could create realistic images from simple text prompts. DALL-E opened the floodgates and was quickly followed by other image generator products, from Midjourney to Adobe Firefly. 

With each new advancement in AI, it can feel to designers like they are steadily marching toward the end of . . . something. If we’re to believe the doomsday narrative, AI seems to signal not just the end of our jobs, but the end of design itself.

Yet as I’ve spoken to leaders across design and AI over the past few months, the future of design feels less dire than our doomerist thinking leads us to believe. Besides, design has survived technological innovation many times before. Is this time really any different?

A long history of near-deaths

This feeling that design is dead, or at least dying, is a familiar one. I’ve worked across the design industry for nearly 20 years—from designer to writer to university professor—and for my entire career, death has seemingly been knocking at our door. 

I have a vivid memory of a high school friend (someone far outside my design world) asking me as we graduated whether I was worried about studying graphic design because anyone could get a copy of Photoshop.

Then in the early 2010s, I remember conversations with designer friends about whether we should be worried about emerging platforms like Squarespace and Wix, which were making web design newly accessible to anyone with an internet connection, while a plethora of logo-making services were emerging, threatening the same for branding.

Last month, when the man installing my new air conditioner asked what I did, and I told him I’m a designer, his first response was to ask how I was dealing with “this AI thing.” 

I’m sure we can go back even further.........

© Fast Company