3 New Skills Designers Need to Stay Employable
Since the cataclysmic shift from pens and paper to computers just 30 short years ago, the design industry has evolved rapidly. Skills designers needed in the 1980s, like typesetting or halftone screening, are now completely redundant. In contrast, the talents required of designers today, like UX research or responsive layout design, would sound completely alien to designers in the 80s and probably even the 90s and early 2000s.
I was there to witness the replacement of ink and cutting boards with mice and keyboards, and the transition was faster than you may think. Then, just as the industry was settling into their new processes, along came the internet and changed the industry all over again. Then came mobile. Then cloud computing. Never ending technological advancements make the design industry one that is in constant flux.
So, how do designers keep up in such a rapidly changing environment and what are some of the skills the designers of today will need in order to stay relevant and employable in the future?
In my opinion, there are three skills designers can and should be developing right now if they want to stay ahead of the curve. For many design roles, particularly in the digital space, these skills will be mandatory by 2024, if not sooner. They are:
- AI prompt writing
- No-code development
- Analytics
Let’s take a look at each of these skills in more detail.
AI prompt writing
One of the most important skills for designers to have in the near future will be AI art prompt writing. This is the process of writing descriptive text prompts that can be interpreted by AI tools to generate designs for a variety of creative applications. Sounds complicated but it’s actually quite a simple skill to learn. While this technology is still in its infancy, it is rapidly evolving and is likely to completely change the design industry, just as computers or the internet did in the past.
The advantages of incorporating AI into your design workflow are already huge. Imagine, as a brand designer, being able to generate a hundred logo ideas for a client in just minutes. Imagine instead of scrolling through thousands of stock photos looking for the perfect pic, you could just generate a photo to your specific requirements in just seconds. Both of these scenarios are already a reality and forward-thinking designers are taking advantage of these technologies right now.
Photos and logos are just the beginning. The way things are headed, websites, animations and even entire app interfaces will likely be generated using AI prompts in the next few years. Learning the basics and incorporating AI into your workflow now, will help prepare you for a future that is fast approaching.
No-code Development
The days of designing a website and just handing your Sketch file over to the development team to reconstruct in code are over. Time is money, and doing things twice was never going to sit well with business managers searching for time-savings.
Design tools like Figma anticipated this problem and changed their platforms to help eliminate a lot of this double-handing, but relying on design tools alone won’t get you across the finish line. There are simply too many code-related functions and conditions for a design tool like Figma to incorporate into their products without bloating them.
Learning some basic no-code or low-code skills enable you to deliver interface designs that don’t need to be interpreted into code by developers. When used properly, no-code tools like Webflow or Bubble, generate clean and responsive front end code. This leaves developers to focus on more important things, like back end development and the more dynamic and interactive aspects of the front end.
Don’t be that designer who makes the development team’s job difficult. Help them out by learning no-code and immediately make yourself a more valuable asset in your workplace and to others in the future. While delivering usable front end code may be just optional for designers today, it won’t be in the future.
Analytics
Designing in a silo, without regard for the outcomes of the product you are designing, is another antiquated approach to design. In today’s data-obsessed culture, the most employable designers understand that everything they do should be driven by data and that their understanding of data is fundamental to their success as a designer.
Everything you design can be measured. Even when designing a new product, competitive research and user testing can uncover all kinds of data to help set your design up for success.
If you’re not incorporating analytics into your design process, then you’re likely falling behind your competition. Design isn’t just about making things look pretty anymore. Designers need to understand how people interact with their designs and what impacts certain design decisions have on the goals of the project.
There are a number of analytics tools available, both free and paid, that are used to track and understand user behaviour. Google Analytics is probably the most well-known, with its mobile counterpart, Firebase, but there are plenty of others. Mixpanel, Hotjar, Amplitude and many more all track user engagement in different ways and can provide valuable insights. Do you need to learn every one of them? Not at all. Different businesses and products use different analytics tools and the learning curve between them isn’t steep. Once you grasp the basic concepts and workflows, your skills in one tool will be transferrable to others.
No matter what area of design you’re in, these three skills are becoming increasingly important and will likely be essential for any designer looking to remain employable into the future. Of course, things are moving fast. Technology is advancing at break-neck speed and AI will likely make its evolution even more exponential. So, while learning these skills might put you ahead of the race now, they could be just the beginning.
