Every designer now leads an orchestra.

That includes knowing when to leave something alone. Having another capability available doesn’t oblige us to use it, any more than every instrument needs to play throughout a piece of music. Some ideas need very little.

The conductor comparison keeps responsibility with the designer. I’m accountable for the decisions, including the ones I’ve asked a tool to execute. I need to understand what I’m looking at and recognize when another person’s expertise would take the work further.

That understanding comes from experience, and access to an agent alone doesn’t supply it. Judgment is built over years of developing work, responding to criticism and seeing how decisions perform in the world. An understanding of typography helps you judge generated type. Knowledge of motion helps you direct timing. Experience of designing for people helps you question an interaction that looks convincing but is difficult to use.

What an agent does give a designer, at any level, is a wider set of decisions to make. Someone early in their career can explore how an idea behaves across image, motion and interaction, then bring something tangible to a conversation with more experienced colleagues. The fundamentals are what make those decisions good ones.

We can build the instruments, too.

When Adobe surveyed creative professionals this year, the most common concern about AI (84%) was maintaining brand continuity. Sixty-four percent worried about creative output starting to look the same. I’ve found that building the tool can be part of the answer to these two concerns. 

I recently used AI to build a flexible, type-based system for a rebrand. The tool created kinetic typography on a grid, with controls for the speed, wave motion and number of words, as well as options for horizontal and vertical grids. I could adapt the same typographic element to different aspect ratios while keeping a consistent look that felt specific to the brand.

Working with AI to develop the tool itself, I could build the creative decisions into how it behaved. The movement, visual weight and arrangement of the words became things I could explore together as the direction developed. I was making something that could produce a range of expressions of the same identity, rather than resolving each application individually.

Initially, I was exploring the creative direction, but I could see a use for the tool beyond my own work. Packaged for the client, it could sit alongside the identity and guidelines, giving their team a way to create assets with the brand’s character built in. They could adjust the movement and composition to suit different formats without having to reconstruct the typographic treatment each time.

Building something like that requires careful thought about the freedom you give people. How far should someone be able to push the speed or wave motion? How does the number of words affect the weight of the composition? I want enough range for the system to be useful across different applications, while protecting the relationships that make it distinctive. Those decisions need to hold up in work that hasn’t been made yet, by people who weren’t involved in developing the brand.

We can build an instrument with a character of its own, then put it into someone else’s hands. For an agency, that opens up a useful possibility: delivering the creative direction alongside a practical way for the client to keep creating with it.

See sooner, then shape together.

Being able to develop an idea across different forms also gives us more ways to communicate it. I can put an early motion study in front of an animator and show the feeling I’m after, leaving them room to bring their experience to it. A developer can respond to a working interaction and suggest possibilities I wouldn’t have known to explore. That’s becoming common practice. In the Figma report, 61% of product builders said they now build interactive prototypes, up from 10% a year earlier.

I’m giving those conversations more to work with. The intention is visible, so another person can question it, build on it or show me a better way of achieving it. A rough execution becomes a bridge between what I can imagine and what we can make together.

Clients benefit from that clarity, too. They can experience the beginnings of a product or see how a story might unfold, and contribute with a better understanding of what is being proposed. We still need to establish whether it works for the intended audience and delivers against the business’s objectives. A compelling demonstration gives us something useful to examine; it doesn’t answer those questions on its own.

I’m far more interested in that capability than in finding out how many versions I can produce in an afternoon. I want to explore an idea thoroughly enough to find something worth developing, then give the people around me a clear way into it. With a purpose-built tool, that contribution can extend into the work a client goes on to create themselves.

At Huge, we see the opportunity for becoming developing designers who can move confidently between these activities, with the judgment to know what the work needs. Someone might begin by directing an agent, discover they need to build a tool and end up giving a whole team a new way to work with an idea.

I still think of myself as a hands-on designer. These days, the thing I design might also be an instrument someone else gets to play.