A quick thinking out loud about the recent news circling design and ai. People calling it vibe designing. To me that’s fine. If you don’t like the act of designing (which I assume, since it’s only about outcome) the pure act of vibe design is fine for some cases. You’ll create value and can proceed quickly. All good.
I started designing interfaces in 2000. Depending on the angle, really. With Dreamweaver and Frontpage I created the sickest Counter Strike Clan pages you could find. Then I jumped on the Flash wagon and with the help of Actionscript I built Flash Banner Ads for the Wall Street Journal. What a time! The curiosity and desire to create, manipulate, build and repeat is unbroken since then. I love the act.
It was never just a job. Design for me was always biting into a chain of problems and find a way to create the best possible path for people to reach their goal. Often it is about reaching the user on an emotional level. This is fun and rewarding. Same goes for photography by the way. Regardless oh how good GenAI is doing, nobody takes away the act of packing stuff, travel to locations and shooting some shitty and some not too shitty photographs. Meeting people, feeling the weather, having an overall great feeling while creating something.
I also design with AI - more on the experiment and prototype level. Vibe designing? Call it what you want. I vibe more, when I do it myself.