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This is an excerpt from my LinkedIn post on 12/3:
The design process is dead. And we helped kill it.
Jenny Wen, Head of Design at Anthropic, said it — and she's right.
The Discovery → Mock → Handoff → Dev cycle gave designers time to polish and iterate. But kept us away from real technical decisions. Dismissed as the "aesthetic opinion" department.
US Big Tech cut junior design hiring by 50% in 2025. Now just 7% of hires.
Why? Developers move faster. Nobody's waiting.
We built this trap ourselves. Design tokens, systems, variables — all the right direction, but we stopped halfway.
AI and vibe coding are giving us a second chance. But only if we accept this: technical literacy is no longer optional. It's what separates designers who shape decisions from those who just execute them.
The craft isn't dead. It's just changing shape.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
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Most websites fail before a single pixel gets designed.
They fail in the brief. "Make it modern. Make it clean. Make it feel like... name any competitor"
That's not a brief, it's a mood board pretending to be a strategy.. We just shipped a Framer site for an AI company.
And we didn't open Framer for 3 weeks, just locked positioning, who's the buyer, what makes them stop scrolling, what objection hits first and what proof kills it.
Then we wrote the site before we designed it, because every section needs a job.
Built the whole thing in Framer in 10 days because the strategy was already done and there were no debates around copy, structure or style. just implementitaion.
Then 2 more days on the final layer with scroll animations, micro interactions, page transitions. That's what turns a good site into one people actually remember.
Fastest way to build a website is to not start with the website.
Love the colors 🎨
I need honest feedback: what would make you stay longer on a case study? 🤔
I recently saw a recommendation in Contra’s dashboard about going deeper on projects to improve portfolio quality, and it made me question how I am presenting my own work.
I tend to write a lot. I like explaining the thinking, the systems, the decisions. But I honestly do not know if people are actually reading it, or just scrolling through the visuals.
I have been revisiting projects like BASYX and asking myself. Is this a portfolio for designers, or for the person hiring me?
Would really appreciate honest feedback. Is this too much copy?
Do you read case studies fully, or just scan?
What actually makes you stop and pay attention?
Honestly the visuals do the scanning, the copy does the convincing — you need both, just don't front-load the text
I’m working on a new project for a previous site I built. A podcast rental studio. If you were booking a studio for your show, which hero would make you more likely to trust the brand and click “Book My Studio” — Full-width image or Collage-style, and why?
53 voted
50%
53 voted
50%
106 votes
Closed
Full, the small images look a little bit distracting in my opinion.
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