7 years ago this week, I published an article about a radical workflow for building software. In my book, I later boiled it down to one simple idea: Use your words more than your hands. It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when designers painted pictures of an interface so an engineer could rebuild it. I was running my agency then, helping enterprises set up design system practices. My job was coaching designers to work in new ways. I had a hunch the old workflow wouldn’t last. Designers spent days or weeks in a static tool, just so someone else could recreate the result somewhere else. Their beautiful work mattered, but their judgment and opinions were worth even more. They just weren’t good at putting those into words. So I told them to practice. Start with the person you work with most: an engineer. The article was called “The Hot Potato Process.” (Link below if you wanna relive the glory days.) I went deeper in my book, Design That Scales. My thinking was simple: designers who can explain their instincts tend to move up. It’s one of the big differences between a designer and an art director or creative director. Little did I know that large language models were just a few years away. Today I see two groups of designers: The first group can explain what they want. We now call it “prompting.” They’re guiding machines that can make almost anything, if you know what to ask for. Some have even put down the keyboard and started talking to their computers. The result is a boom of new tools and toys, built by designers who now make software themselves. Many tell me they’ve never felt more energized. I heard the same thing years ago from designers who had just learned the Hot Potato Process. The second group is holding on to the old way. Maybe it’s habit, belief, or fear. Many are struggling and worried about their careers. (And lots of designers are somewhere in the middle.) ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022 isn’t what’s pushing designers out. It just sped up something that was already happening. When responsive web design took off in 2009, I moved my own workflow to “deciding in the browser” and tried to get as many designers as I could to do the same. Design has been moving away from static tools for a long time. They still have a place. But dynamic environments need dynamic tools and rules. What keeps designers stuck isn’t a love of Photoshop or Figma. It’s the belief that what they make matters more than what they think. If you haven’t made this shift, make it now. Yes, better late than never, but it soon might be too late.

Another great example of a love letter to a client!