Anyone can make something that looks designed, but that doesn’t mean that design has happened.

A few months ago, a client was reviewing a landing page design with my team. They had created it themselves using a page builder tool — one of those platforms that integrate content management and visual design in a single interface. They wanted feedback as we prepared to take over their design systems.

The page was a mess, though not in the way you might expect. It wasn’t ugly nor was it broken in any meaningful way. But because the tool gave them so many options for constructing the page and made it so easy to just drop them in, drop them in they did — all of them. This page was as loaded as a continental breakfast buffet plate: Multiple calls to action competed with one another across the entire layout. Buttons, forms, links — all demanding attention, none of them working together.

I asked them a simple question: “What do you want the people who land on this page to do?”

They had a hard time answering. After some discussion, they eventually came to a consensus. The problem was that none of the calls to action crowding the page would lead to the outcome they had settled upon. This is because they had not asked themselves this question before creating the page. When you don’t let strategy shape how you use a tool, the tool becomes the strategy. The result was a page with confused and unclear objectives, and a design that was impossible to scan and respond to.

This is the first of what I consider the two biggest challenges facing design today.

The Biggest Design Challenge is the Opportunity

Despite a continually growing awareness and experience of design in the marketplace, and despite the proliferation of design tools that put sophisticated capabilities in the hands of anyone with a web browser, designers and buyers of design services still lack a fundamental knowledge of what design is, how it works to capitalize on human attention, and how to apply it alongside brand expression. More than twenty years in to my career, I still spend as much time teaching the fundamentals as I do helping people navigate new things. I could view this as a frustration, but I shouldn’t: it has been what has made my career viable.

The landing page example illustrates this perfectly. The tools have made execution accessible. Anyone can now create something that looks professional, that uses modern layouts and typography, that feels designed. But producing something that feels designed does not mean that any design has happened. Most tools don’t ask you what you want someone to do. They don’t force you to make hard choices about hierarchy and priority. They offer you options, and if you don’t already understand the fundamentals of how design guides attention and serves purpose, you’ll end up using too many of them to no end.

This gap between execution and understanding has only widened as tools have become more powerful. In some ways, the democratization of design tools has made the problem worse. When design required technical skill — when you had to know your way around Photoshop or understand HTML and CSS — there was at least a barrier to entry that ensured some level of engagement with the craft. Now, the barriers are gone, but the understanding hasn’t rushed in to fill the space. And why would it? The reason these tools exist is not just to make “design” more accessible (a good thing), but to make “design” happen faster (not often a good thing). We can all make things faster than ever before, but because we’ve forgotten that friction is often a feature, not a bug, we don’t always make them better. When things took longer to make, we had time to think more about the relationship between form and function, intent and experience, input and output.

The Second Design Challenge is Time

This brings me to the second challenge: the pace of change is only accelerating, and it is a serious challenge to designers to determine how much time to spend keeping up.

There is always a new tool or technology to try or learn. But then there is the work you were already doing before that thing came along. AI is the big one right now — generative tools that promise to speed up ideation, automate production, transform workflows. Before AI, it was design systems and component libraries. Before that, it was responsive design and mobile-first thinking. Before that, it was social media and the shift to user-generated content. Before that, it was Web 2.0 and the sophistication of content management systems. Before that, it was simply the web itself, and the question of how design would translate from print to screen. Before that, it was the computer itself.

I’ve been doing this for over twenty years, and this pattern has never stopped. New tools and technology have always cast a shadow on the fundamentals of design and strategy. Each wave promises to change everything, and each wave demands that designers pay attention, evaluate, learn, or risk being left behind.

The vast majority of the new things are rightly rejected. Most tools don’t solve real problems — they solve problems that the tool itself created, or they offer marginal improvements on workflows that already function well enough. But it takes time to discern the useful from the distraction, and the one thing we haven’t gotten more of over the course of my career is time.

I was an early adopter of Figma, which turned out well for me and my team. But in hindsight, it was a risk. I didn’t know then that Figma would turn out to be the dominant design tool. I got lucky. The time I invested in learning it could have been wasted on any number of tools that came and went without leaving a trace. These days, I regularly bookmark new tools under a file labeled “tools to review,” and I try to make some time each week to look back over them, assess their features and costs, and try out the ones that actually look like they could solve a problem I have now. Most don’t end up passing. Even though that means there is a time cost to simply keeping up, it seems worthwhile in case the next Figma comes along.

But here’s the tension: these two challenges work against each other.

Teaching fundamentals takes time. Understanding how design captures attention, how it serves purpose, how it operates within the constraints of brand and strategy — these things can’t be rushed. They require conversation, iteration, examples, reflection. But just as you might carve out time to help a client understand why their landing page isn’t working, you’re being pulled away to evaluate the next tool, the next technology, the next promise of transformation, and so are they. Are they listening to your explanations, or are they already in another tab, trying another new thing? One can only hope.

You can’t build foundational knowledge while chasing the new. But you can’t ignore the new entirely, or you’ll fall behind. So you split your time, and both efforts can suffer. The fundamentals remain elusive because you’re too busy keeping up. The tools remain half-learned because you’re too busy teaching.

And the irony is that the fundamentals are what actually help you discern which new tools matter. When you understand what design is for, when you know how attention works, when you can articulate what a page or interface or system should accomplish, you can quickly assess whether a new tool serves that purpose or distracts from it. The fundamentals are the filter. But to develop that filter, you need time and space that the acceleration won’t give you.

Prioritization of the Fundamentals

I don’t have a solution to this. I don’t think there is one, really. This is just the reality of working in a field that sits at the intersection of human behavior and technological change. Both move, but at different speeds. Human attention, cognition, emotion — these things change slowly, if at all. Technology changes constantly. Design has to navigate both.

What I do know is that the fundamentals don’t go away. The question of “what do you want people to do?” doesn’t become obsolete. The principles of hierarchy, contrast, rhythm, flow — these persist across every tool and platform. The new things come and go, but the old questions remain. Maybe that’s the only real answer: keep asking the old questions, even when the new tools make it seem like you don’t have to.

For whatever reason, we’re living at this time, and these are our design challenges. A new tool isn’t going to solve them, and we can’t change that. But we do have some control over how we spend our time and what we prioritize. For me, I have prioritized the fundamentals of design, and have made them what I focus my use of any new technology on. I always look for the ways the tools make it easy to produce something flawed, and that perspective always make me a better user of that technology and a better advisor to those that haven’t done the same.

Christopher Butler, November 3, 2025 Filed under: Essays