A Few Mild Predictions for Designers in 2025
Navigating climate change, impermanence, AI mania, and shifting political tides with and through design
Dear Designer,
It’s an annual mainstay for journalists and pundits and pawns. Consider me in the latter category as I lay down a few things to expect in 2025. It’s not super exhaustive but I will do my best to keep it interesting.
There is a lot on the horizon and many of us are looking for our umbrellas waiting for the sky to fall.
While I’m convinced that the sky will remain (albeit replete with many more Starlink objects) there are going to be a number of significant shifts for all of us graphic designers — those of us who earn our daily bread by focusing on brand, digital, UX and applications for communications, outreach and engagement.
So, here we go.
Climate change will become increasingly evident while we momentarily hibernate. Last week, I spoke with my dharma teacher and asked for a few words of guidance for the coming year. As I mentioned in last week’s love letter, there is tremendous churn in our various systems — local, technological and geopolitical — resulting in great shifts in how we will connect over the coming five years.
My teacher has been meditating particularly on impermanence and he implied that we are increasingly uncomfortable with acknowledging our individual mortality. The games, the gadgets, the gear, the gawking — all of these distractions compete for our attention, eating up what little time we allow ourselves to take part in nature, to volunteer or to have a simple heart-to-heart .
While our heads bow to our phones and our laptops, the earth hurtles into climate crises.
I see the new political establishments exacerbating our feelings of inadequacy and senses of uncertainty. Our political advocacy will be harder to channel and corral.
Right now, most folks I know are in deep respite. We’re exhausted, anxious and rightly tired. There is no one leading the way toward peace, justice and liberation.
However, in 2025, there will be a significant vacuum for smart, compassionate and organized activists (designers very much included) who want to make a difference, who can dive in and build out, and who seek to connect with this great unknowing.
This is the opportunity, dear designer, to create the punk rock activist scene that you’ve always wanted. To DIY your work into protest — online and in real life — and to channel our boundless uncertainty into helping the planet and the most vulnerable who are living on it.AI will become a more critical and non-optional component of our work. And at the same time, it will not be totalizing. Further, we will not be replaced.
How do I know this? Even the biggest of corporations haven’t figured out how to use AI or how to make it work, despite the billions spent.
Over the past few months, Apple has rolled out a miserable AI implementation. I recently tried adding a few simple numbers in my Notes app and iOS kept overwriting my own answers — an infuriating act of brazen non-intelligence. Figma attempted to release a “Make Designs” (lol) AI design tool a few months ago. Someone prompted it to “create a weather app” and the resulting design looked like Apple’s Weather app. Similar instances happened with Microsoft, Twitter and almost all of the other big brothers.
These are actually blessings.
We are increasingly going to be asked to cede control of our individual decision-making to the AI machines, as Silicon Valley deems it “useful” to our searching, creating, and communicating. But there will be new tools to emerge to shut out or shut down the AI on our devices and we will become excited and then frustrated with the various rollouts of AI into our social space. We will also witness the slow emergence of AGI (artificial general intelligence) and the arrival of AI agents that manage our affairs — booking a trip, organizing a meeting, sending packages, etc. Theoretically (machines becoming fully sentient) and practically (machines operating independently), these changes will feel like magic.
But avoiding AI won’t be an option, unfortunately. We designers will grapple with the ethical implications of AI — the greatest theft in history of intellectual property, its energy usage that is precipitating the relaunch of nuclear plants, its black box footing which prevents public transparency, and its lack of controls around our individual privacy. However, in 2025, some designers who critically embrace AI — and use it to enable better work while fighting for their own creative rights — will build useful design systems, frameworks and tools.Writing and communications will change in the strangest of ways. As you can tell from the above, I am cautiously realistic about the changes on the near horizon and patently pragmatic about our responses to them, dear designer. While a number of folks I know can still tell an AI-written essay from a human-written one, I predict that this will become more difficult. I worry about journalism most.
We will forever need excellent writers for our work as communicators. That will not go away — but pressure will be put upon us to use AI in considered and considerable ways. Many independent designers will reach for their AI when it comes to writing, especially for smaller projects with smaller budgets.
With machine writing more accepted and acceptable, new freelancers and smaller designer shops will find it difficult to differentiate. Experienced professional writers and designers will be fine but it will get more and more murky.
In 2025, I predict that we will want to seek out excellent writing and support. The enshittification of the internet through AI will continue and we’ll follow those who care, those who document, those who look forward and those who peer backward. You might check out Brian Merchant’s fascinating newsletter Blood in the Machine.Costs for design will fall — and rise. This brings me to my last little design-related prediction. Over the past year plus, digital agencies and design studios have seen a drop in the number of clients and a decline in budgets. Having talked with dozens of agency owners, designers and consultants, I believe that this has been driven by three factors — a need for fewer design services after the COVID-related spending surge, a rise in templated design tools, and social insecurity around the U.S. election.
This will change. More organizations will need more design in 2025. Wallets will open up again. There will be a lot of work. But, in the same way that economic inequality is creating larger gulfs between the wealthy and the rest of us, digital design services will continue to bifurcate. On the one hand, we’ll have individuals and smaller organizations seeking inexpensive template design using pre-existing tools and platforms. On the other, we’ll have medium and larger organizations demanding visual excellence, typographic differentiation and written virtuosity.
Courage, dear designer. We’re in for a ride but you are more needed than ever before in the history of before.
Yours,
Image of the Week
Beat artist and poet Wallace Berman published an odds-and-ends journal between 1955 and 1964 called Semina. He thought of art-making as an expression of everyday existence and not a careerist pursuit. I’ve never seen Berman’s work live, but some of the work is fascinating, using cardboard, assemblage, collage, paste-up lettering and drawing. Above is the cover of one issue with Wallace’s wife, Shirley Berman. Semina has been called a “portable salon” of artists, designers and writers — Berman was prescient in his early adaptation of zine-making, tapping into his community and creating objects that can shared, collected and discovered.
Quote of the Week
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
~ Alice Walker
To an Exultant 2025
Thank you for being a reader, dear designer. I am truly grateful for your continued interest.
May the year 2025 bring you and your loved ones mazel and momentum.
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