The One Way to Get Better at (And Still Enjoy) Product Design When AI Does Half the Work
Watch & Listen:
Every designer wants sharper craft and better taste. But with the new tools generating close to all of your work, it's tempting to skip the design fundamentals entirely. I mean... who knows anything about gestalt or color theory anymore?!
Also, social media is full of hot takes claiming UX is dead and the double diamond is over. None of this or the above helps you to enjoy your job as a Product Designer. Luckily, there's a better way.
In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick continue their series on becoming a modern, in-demand product designer with part two: improving your hard skills. They skip the hype and focus on how you get better at the output, whether you like building everything by hand or running 20 directions in parallel.
Tyler makes the case for learning the fundamentals the slow way first, so you can art direct the tools instead of just trusting whatever they come up with. He shares how he uses Figma's agent to apply a design system to his mockups, and why talking through a problem with ChatGPT for 30 minutes is part of his discovery. Nick is much more skeptical and explains why reviewing an AI-generated 80% version can be more exhausting than designing it yourself.
They also agree on a very boring answer: repetition. Copy the designers you admire, make something every day, and build a playground of experiments that shows off your range.
Key takeaways
"If you're not using your designer brain, you can really fail at your deliverable—get a base level understanding of design, aesthetics, spacing, proper UX, so you can be the art director you need to be when you onboard these newer AI tools."
"Repetition seems like the thing—either creating something new or replicating something that currently exists, so you're trying all these different things, and the goal is not that you want to implement every one of those techniques into what you're building, but just that you have them at the ready."
Watch it on YouTube
Hosts
Tyler White
Tyler White is a Principal Product Designer with 15 years of experience in B2B SaaS and fintech, helping teams scope, frame, and connect design work to real business outcomes.
Nick Groeneveld
Nick Groeneveld is a freelance UX and product designers from the Netherlands. He started his design career in 2015 and has since then worked for startups, government agencies, and corporations.
