Insane thread by @raunofreiberg reviewing portfolios. I’ve certainly learnt a thing or two.

Things I would love to see in design recruitment: - Personal agents for designers and leaders. - Designers going into recruitment. And I don’t mean designers putting a candidate board up and making some intros, actual end to end recruiting. I’m starting to think about adding to the small and mighty Verified team and if there was designers who would be interested I would genuinely consider it. I’ve spoken about this before and the more I think about it, I love the idea

The amount of inflated job titles in design is wild.

What a great night at Index Ventures 30th party 🎉

These "Design is dead" and "Designers are cooked" posts are absurd. They are posted by people who are clueless about what is actually happening, or influencer-type people just rage-baiting. In my humble opinion, designers' role inside companies is as important as ever. When everyone can create visuals with ease, the taste, craft and judgement are clearly vital. The future is bright for design. Ignore these posts. They serve no purpose.

10 reasons why I'm seeing designers leave jobs: 1. Going back into IC mode. 2. Not given freedom to build. 3. Too much process and layers. 4. Wanting to work in small teams. 5. Wanting to work on an AI product. 6. Looking to escape post-acquisition. 7. Poor design-engineering partnership. 8. Design only being asked to focus on UI. 9. The company is too slow to ship anything. 10. Burnout. Very common, and just to breathe. Nothing groundbreaking here, just the acceleration of problems that already exist. I would say I'm speaking to a lot more leaders who want to move back into IC mode as they want to enjoy building again.

If you're a 30-person start-up and looking for a design leadership hire, you do not need to hire an executive who leads 100s of designers. You need to hire for the next 2 years. Hire someone who can take you into the next 2 years of growth, who has worked at a similar scale and is comfortable with a lack of processes, etc. I've observed start-ups hiring someone from large companies only for that person not to work out because they either get bored, or a terrible fit because believe they have the answers because they did a certain way elsewhere. I also see a lot of Founding Designers move into Principal/Senior IC roles and allow a Head of Design to take over the team, as they know where they are strongest.

The next big role in design will be an AI Designer. This is not a Product Designer who ships AI products. This is how one client has described it: The UI is a container. The software's look and the AI's behaviour are two separate surfaces, and this role owns the second. Your job is to make sure the AI delivers valuable outcomes consistently and feels right everywhere it shows up. An AI Designer does the following: - Design AI behaviour as a first-class product surface, not as a layer on top of the UI. - Own "meta-skill" design - designing the skills that shape how our agents behave. This is not deterministic work; it is designing behaviour within bounds. - Shape the AI generation experience itself - what the model produces, and how it feels to use. - Work adjacent to model-behaviour work (how the model "feels") in close partnership with the ML team. - Own the AI experience consistently across every surface.

You can't just use AI to generate screens quickly and assume that makes you a designer. Tools are making people faster, but they can't replace the knowledge and deep understanding behind the work. In other words, you can't shortcut design knowledge. The difference between someone claiming they can do design work and someone who is an actual designer is they have acquired knowledge over many years and actually study the craft of design, not just vibe-code a bunch of AI slop and pass it off as good design work.

What I've come to realise from meeting many great designers: There are 100s of designers who have spent the last decade heads-down making great work, rather than building an audience, and it's those people we need to be getting into discussions. The loudest voices online are often not the people you want to learn from. I'm all for building personal brand, but have something to back it up.

I can't remember the last time I saw a double diamond in a portfolio, and I never want to see one again. I've seen too many in my lifetime!

What are the best side projects you've seen? I am writing an article with @IniAbiodun on her thoughts and approaches to side projects, and thought it would be cool to feature a few others.

I love the internet. How dare I have an opinion.

I think we'll see shorter tenures for designers (and other roles) in the next few years: - We can't predict the future; companies may overhire and need to let people go. - We can't wait around for companies to figure it out, so people will not settle for working in average companies and want to work for companies that "get" AI and the new way of doing design work. It's less of a red flag for me to see a "jumpy" resume if they can back it up with solid reasoning as to why they leave, and why they are applying for new roles. No one cares about your career as much as you, so take ownership of it.

Europemaxxing. Wondering the streets of incredible towns in France is unmatched in the summer.

I can still use my brain to write an article. Good to know! Winning.

What I love about X is that there are so many designers who are not even on LinkedIn, who work for random agencies and companies doing insane work. The passion for sharing great work comes through on here. This place also feels less toxic than a few years ago.

I am falling down the rabbit hole on here just in admiration of designers sharing unreal work. This is what you don't get on LinkedIn. Feels like LinkedIn is about a month behind X in terms of what people are talking about.