When we think about designers, two main characteristics often come to mind: craft skills and taste. Craft skills are the technical abilities that allow designers to manipulate tools — whether physical, like pen and paper in the early days, or digital design software like Photoshop and Figma today — to create their desired output. Taste, on the other hand, is the ability to perceive and refine quality in design, guiding the look and feel of an output toward something that feels refined and cohesive.
Designers have traditionally been valued not only for their expertise with tools but for their unique aesthetic judgments, which bring ideas to life in ways that resonate with audiences. It’s not enough just to use the tools well; designers need the discernment to make decisions about colours, layouts, typography, and flow in order to transform a rough concept into a polished product. However, while many people have an innate sense of taste and quality, they may lack the technical proficiency to translate those ideas into a design accurately-until recently, that is.
With the emergence of advanced design systems and large language models (LLMs), we’re seeing a dramatic shift in the design landscape. This technology is democratising access to design, enabling individuals with limited craft skills to…
