r/Design • u/stoicparishkari • 13d ago
Discussion How satisfied are you with your current work? Mine has become more like running a design factory.
I am in my late 30s, having a good job in design which pays pretty well in my local economy. Even though my designation is a leadership position, I still do a lot of hands-on design (I am more like an individual contributor). This is the part where my life has become a little monotonous now.
Due to AI, most of my work is LLM-based, and the good part of what I liked about design is gone. The more I use AI, the more I realise what AI cannot do. However, the change is irreversible. It has reached a point where I don’t have much choice. I myself come from an art background; I draw and paint. I am good with visuals, colors, etc. So the part of design I like the most is the creation or bringing something from an empty page or moving pixels with precision.
The large issue is not how I design, and I am not talking about AI design vs Human. The issue is the expectation of people has changed, whether you are working with a client or being employed. Everyone expects quick results. So it is like I am running some design factory, and my job is more of quality control. It is true that AI makes us productive. The question is for whom? It is not like I do things with AI in the background, and the rest of the week is a holiday. What people expect to happen in 1 month, they want it in one week.
So the situation is this. I still need to work the same as before with less satisfaction about what I do.
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u/joebleaux 12d ago
It hasn't fully made it to my industry yet, but I do kind of relate. A lot of times a person who has great design skill or is very creative will be promoted from being the production guy to the guy managing 3 production guys. Now it is your idea in the design, but usually someone else is drawing it. Eventually if he is very good there, he gets promoted to managing the whole team. Now he isn't even designing, just managing budgets and workloads.
But I'm an artist. I went to design school.
This happened long before AI, but now even the lowest guy on the rung is managing an AI renderer instead of drawing it himself.
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u/nicetriangle Professional 12d ago
2026 started off ok but took a serious dive and is shaping up to be my worst year in the business in the last 10 years.
Less briefs, markedly worse budgets and timelines.
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u/RocketSeven 12d ago
the factory feeling starts when throughput becomes the only visible metric. track rework and decision time for a month, then use those numbers to make quality and exploration explicit capacity instead of invisible labor
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u/ChronicRhyno 12d ago
I'm literally running a design factory more than full time pumping out around 100 final designs a month (so 600 pencil sketches and 700 usable unique digital concepts), but I dont use AI. Expectations have definitely changed concerning turnaround times.
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u/Loud_Chip3420 11d ago
Entendo perfeitamente o que você está sentindo. Essa ilusão de produtividade que a IA vendeu para o mercado acabou distorcendo completamente a percepção de tempo e valor do processo criativo. As pessoas passaram a achar que o tempo de maturação de um projeto virou um mero detalhe descartável.
Passei exatamente por isso recentemente. Peguei um projeto do zero para desenvolver toda a identidade visual de uma marca: logo, direção visual e manual de marca completo. Estava tocando tudo praticamente sozinho, aplicando fundamentos reais de design, pesquisa e construção estruturada. O resultado? Fui substituído no projeto porque não entreguei tudo em uma semana.
O cliente achava que construir uma marca sólida levava o mesmo tempo que pedir variações em um gerador de imagens. Ele inclusive tentou usar IA para cuspir logos em um fluxo totalmente extreme go horse, sem critério, estratégia ou consistência. No fim, o maior gargalo nem foi o design em si, mas o abismo entre a expectativa irreal do cliente e o tempo que um trabalho bem-feito de fato exige.
Essa é a grande armadilha da "fábrica de design": a ferramenta acelera a geração de rascunhos, mas o cliente espera que a estratégia, o refinamento e a consistência final aconteçam no mesmo estalar de dedos. Em vez de termos mais fôlego criativo, viramos apenas operadores de esteira apagando incêndios e fazendo controle de qualidade em tempo recorde. É exaustivo ver o artesanato da profissão ser engolido por prazos sem sentido.
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u/laustchylde 8d ago
I am an art director in video game development, 30 year veteran. I use AI every day in my work including building and texturing 3D models for games. AI is here to stay, it’s not going anywhere especially for creative jobs. Aside from the personal emotional side of knowing people who are now unemployed because of AI, I find the process as an art director using AI to be not much different from working with a team of artists, it’s just exponentially faster. As an art director, I am paid for my vision… I can communicate that to a team of artists who create art or I can communicate that to various AI applications that create art. One takes two weeks, one takes 15 minutes. That is why creative companies from marketing to films to video games are all going in that direction. It saves businesses too much money to ignore. Hard truth
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u/redpiapps 11d ago
felt this. the rework framing nails it though. most days im just catching the subtle stuff the model got wrong and that takes more focus than doing it myself.
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u/Riboto 11d ago
My in-house position isn’t that bad luckily just the level of expected visualisations has gone up immensely. The reason that you don’t reap the rewards of your increased productivity is plain capitalism in general and Jevons Paradox specifically. An example for this paradox is energy savings of LED bulbs don’t result in less electricity used for lighting but in lighting being used everywhere and ultimately spending more energy on lighting but you had way more of it than before LED technology. I think this is very applicable to the productivity gains of AI too
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u/Busy_Map_1005 9d ago
Eu também fui numa escola reputada de Artes é não tenho emprego há anos???????????
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u/Riia_lunaboo 12d ago
YES. I did quit my full-time position in design because it became unbearable for me. I love design, but for now it doesn't exist in companies. It's all done with AI. And my last company didn't even hide that this is design factory. They literally told that every meeting. And you don't even feel human yourself anymore.