An Open Letter to Young Creatives + Strategists Just Starting Your Careers

An open letter to young designers and strategists

I’ve been coming up against the same question a lot lately, and it isn’t being asked dramatically or rhetorically. It’s usually offered carefully, almost cautiously, by someone who’s trying to sound practical rather than afraid.

It comes up at the end of talks, during design student walkthroughs, or in the quieter moments after panels—when the formal questions are over and what’s left is something more honest. Will there still be a job for us five years from now? What role will human creativity actually play as AI gets better, faster, and cheaper at producing the work?

What started as the occasional question has become a near certainty. If I’m in a room with students or early-career designers and strategists, some version of it will surface. And it’s not hard to understand why.

You’re entering this field at a strange moment in its history.

Not long ago, becoming a designer or strategist meant years of training, apprenticeship, and repetition before anyone trusted you with meaningful responsibility. Today, AI can generate a logo in seconds, a website in minutes, a brand system by lunch. The barrier to entry hasn’t just lowered—it’s collapsed. Along with it has gone much of the shared understanding of what this work even is anymore.

So I want to speak to you directly.

Especially if you feel both excited by what’s possible and unsettled by what feels unstable. Especially if you’re wondering whether learning the fundamentals still matters when templates and tools appear to do so much of the work for you.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe.

As a (quickly aging) partner in an agency that already relies heavily on AI, and as someone who spends their days working with leading brands, designers, and strategists navigating this shift in real time, I don’t see a future where craft disappears.

I see one where it matters more than ever.

Every abundance creates a new kind of scarcity

We’re living through an era of creative abundance. Output is cheap. Production is instant. Almost anyone can make something that looks professional enough to pass.

But abundance always creates scarcity somewhere else.

What’s becoming rare isn’t execution. It’s judgment.

Knowing what to make, why to make it, when to stop. Knowing which constraint to respect instead of bypass. Knowing what not to touch.

AI is powerful because it’s an amalgamation—of patterns, trends, precedents, and probabilities. Left on its own, it naturally pulls toward the center. Toward what already exists. Toward what’s been validated. Toward what feels familiar.

That isn’t a flaw. That’s exactly what it’s designed to do.

But without discernment, you don’t get originality. You get competence without conviction. Work that sits perfectly equidistant from every popular option—and therefore means very little.

The early digital artists understood this instinctively. When copying became easy, value shifted to what happened after the first output. The distance the artist traveled. The decisions they made. The opinion they held.

That dynamic hasn’t changed. AI just accelerates the starting line.

A conversation that stuck with me

I sit on the advisory board for a design school. Not long ago, a professor asked a question that’s stayed with me:

“Do we even need to teach typography, colour theory, hierarchy anymore? If students are going to use templates and AI tools, what does it matter?”

I understood the question immediately. It was pragmatic. Reasonable. Rooted in a real fear that we’re preparing students for jobs that may not exist in the same form.

But my answer surprised even me in how quickly it came.

It matters more than ever.

Because tools don’t replace understanding. They expose the absence of it.

Without theory, almost everything looks fine. With theory, you start to see the cracks.

And here’s the part that’s easy to miss: even when people can’t articulate what’s wrong, they still feel it. The average person may not know why something feels off, but it changes how much they trust it. How long they stay with it. Whether they believe it.

You can sense when something is hollow. Generic. Borrowed. Slightly out of alignment.

You can also tell when a system won’t survive real content, real users, real pressure.

And once you see that, you stop hoping tools will save you—and start using them deliberately.

The music class I still think about

In high school, I took a music class that had nothing to do with design, but taught me more about it than most of the design books I’ve read.

Our teacher would play an orchestral piece and ask us to sit in silence. No talking. No notes. Just listening.

Afterward, he’d ask us to name every instrument we could hear. Not just what was playing, but when it entered. When it dropped out. Why the tension worked. Why a swell landed emotionally. Why one passage made your chest tighten while another let you breathe again.

We weren’t learning how to play music. We were learning how to understand it. That’s the job.

Design. Branding. Film. Web. Strategy.

The hard part isn’t pressing record, shipping a site, or generating a logo. It’s the hundreds—sometimes thousands—of small decisions along the way.

What you emphasize. What you restrain. What you borrow. What you leave behind.

That’s where meaning actually lives.

The future belongs to archivists

The designers and strategists who will matter most in the coming decade won’t be the fastest producers.

They’ll be the ones with memory.

They’ll recognize patterns because they’ve seen them before. They’ll know the tropes, the trends, the historical styles. The typographic lineages. The interaction patterns that quietly signal trust, risk, authority, or rebellion.

They’ll be fluent in culture, language, and context—not to replicate them, but to bend them.

In that sense, the future creative is an archivist. A librarian. Someone with an insatiable curiosity and a long mental shelf of references they can reach for with precision.

AI becomes incredibly powerful in their hands because they know exactly what ingredients to ask for—and which ones to leave out.

Learn the theory. Learn the business. Learn the tools—and their limits.

If you’re a student, here’s the advice I wish I’d been given earlier.

Learn the fundamentals deeply. Not because you’ll always apply them explicitly, but because they give you discernment.

Learn typography so you can feel when type is doing the work. Learn hierarchy so you know where attention naturally wants to go. Learn colour so you understand the emotional and cultural weight it carries.

But don’t stop at craft.

Learn business. Learn differentiation. Learn how markets work. Learn how competitors accidentally signal sameness.

And learn the tools—but study their limitations. Templates show you where convention lives. AI shows you what’s average.

Your job is to decide when average is acceptable—and when it isn’t.

This is the real divide

AI will help the average person create something competent, quickly. That’s not the threat.

The real divide is between those who have taste, perspective, judgment—an opinion worth trusting—and those who don’t. Your value will never be that you can make a logo, website, or campaign.

Your value is that you can create something that reflects the soul of what’s being built. Something that understands the opportunity. Something that feels inevitable once it exists.

That’s not automation-proof. That’s human.

So let others treat AI like a magic bullet. You treat it like an instrument. Learn the scales. Study the greats. Understand why things work. Then compose something new.

That’s the work. And it still matters.