Betrayed by design tools

Ever since the days of when Photoshop and Fireworks ruled the space of “web design” it has been clunky to create responsive design. I come from a design background, my undergrad is in Interactive Media Design where we covered all sorts from UI design, sound design and even game design. I had taught myself enough PHP, HTML & CSS at school/college to be dangerous. So for my course work I would always produce something that functioned. Fun fact, I produced a concept for a “mobile” site back in 2010 prior to coined term of responsive design, I was mocked by my lecturers claiming “no one will use the web this way”… 15 years later I can say I feel more than validated with what I was doing back then. But I felt like the design tools always came up short, I always ended up back in a code editor sooner rather than later.

With the recent Google I/O (May 2025) I can’t help but think design tools still aren’t keeping up and are keeping designers behind the curve and letting the developers in the room dominate what the future of user experiences look like. This is not to say that devs can’t be good at design, it’s just rare that you find a dev that is really capable of design as well as coding. Applications like Figma make a big assumption about visual interfaces, but when you look at what Google is presenting, sure some of it does require some form of UI, but a lot is moving to towards voice and vision. The prime example is their concept for AR (augmented reality) glasses, how do would you make meaningful concept for a device like this using Figma? I think it’s possible but you would still have to play within it’s rules and assumptions it forces you into.

This isn’t a rant about how designers should code, far from it, we should be looking outside of the box for how we keep our roles relevant in a world that is changing rapidly. There is the big AI Elephant (with two trunks) in the room that has a lot of people concerned about their future as a designer. To me a designer is the champion of the end users and that takes many shapes. A lot of people would describe this as “UX” work. However before web designers, we had graphic designers, and before that we had communication designers, which I almost think we should be moving back to. “How does the user interact with x” and “how does x communicate back to the user”, these are the fundamentals of design and it’s not lost in a world of chat apps and devices you can talk to.

I believe the current tools are no longer the best fit for where we’re heading. There are opportunities to adopt approaches that align more naturally with a product-driven pipeline, are better positioned for future needs, and create far more room for creativity and innovation.

When there are no longer simple rectangles to move around, it may be worth reconsidering how tightly coupled your thinking is to the tools themselves. This could be the moment to step back, loosen those constraints, and experiment with new ways of working—approaches that better equip you to build for a world that is evolving faster every day.