When I started out in my first studio, most of our work was print. I’d bring a few options to the senior designers, they’d tell me which concept had legs and how to sharpen the execution, and I’d go back and do it again, then wait for the client’s feedback at the client’s pace. Learning to design a flyer or a piece of packaging properly took me a couple of years of very similar projects, over and over, before I really understood the principles behind them. Later, when I moved into digital design and worked on websites and conversion, there was more to wait for: the build, the launch, the market, and if I was lucky, some good numbers at the end. That was the ladder from junior to senior, and it’s being pulled up.
To be honest, I think AI already has almost everything a junior brings to a team. On my own projects, I constantly feel like I’ve hired an account manager and a couple of junior and mid-level designers, and they usually do a fantastic job, so I don’t need to hire anyone for that work. It’s starting to show in the numbers too. Employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the jobs most exposed to AI is now about 19% below where it would otherwise be, while experienced workers in the same jobs show no such gap.
I still think the way someone becomes senior hasn’t changed. It’s the same mechanism and the same mentality. What has changed is the waiting, and for someone who’s self-driven and doesn’t wait for other people’s permission, the whole thing can be fast-tracked a lot.
By senior I don’t mean the title. The title and the way of working don’t always come together. The more senior someone becomes, the more they live outside the design tools. In three mentoring sessions in two weeks, I found myself telling designers the same thing in different words. A senior designer doesn’t blindly follow the brief. They see through it to what it’s really for, and decide from there.
Take an FAQ page. A designer can add a few accordions and move on. A more senior designer starts by asking why the page is needed and what it’s meant to achieve. If it’s there for search, or for the AI tools that now answer people’s questions, they’d check whether the content is thorough enough for that, and whether the page sits in the right place. If it’s there to lift conversion, they might find the content is the core of the offer and shouldn’t be hidden in an FAQ at all. An FAQ is like the Q&A at the end of a presentation. It ties up loose ends, and it shouldn’t carry the main point.
The habit is Toyota’s five whys, applied to a task. Keep asking “so what”, and you’ll know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Sometimes the why is right there in the brief. Sometimes it isn’t, and it takes initiative to find out, ask, and talk it through with whoever gave you the brief. There’s a limit, though. Once you know the FAQ page is there to lift conversion, asking why the company wants conversion takes you into business strategy, like how it weighs the website against its other channels, and that’s where a junior can stop asking.
Before AI, building that habit meant two kinds of waiting. The first was waiting for feedback and results. Now a lot of that first check can happen with AI before anyone else sees the work, and it picks up the low-hanging fruit a junior can’t see yet. It isn’t a senior’s eye, though. AI’s feedback isn’t calibrated, and a beginner can’t tell good feedback from bad, so the human reviews still matter. And in the end, the real test still comes when you deliver the work to the people it’s for.
The second kind of waiting was on methods and tools, and that’s the one I never did much of. I think it’s what sped up my own career. In my early years at a digital agency I was the most junior designer, so I made a point of learning the Adobe tools inside out. I’m lazy the way engineers are lazy. If I found myself doing something over and over, I’d turn it into a template or an automated flow. Later I taught myself Sketch, moved into UX and UI, and picked up Figma early, back before it had auto layout.
That kind of tool know-how doesn’t matter much anymore. Knowing how to set up auto layout or build design-system components in Figma matters less once AI takes it over, and the same goes for a lot of the nuances of code. Knowledge comes faster too. Learning UI patterns used to mean a course or a lot of research of your own, and to understand how a design system was built, I used to buy expensive UI kits just to take them apart. Now you can ask AI to walk you through the patterns, with sources, or generate a design system and study it. When a concept is complicated, AI can explain it in simpler language, which has mattered a lot to me, since English is my second language. I often map a new concept in FigJam with AI, and sometimes as a 3D model, until I can see how the parts relate.
So AI fast-tracks knowledge and learning, while judgment still takes years. A junior still has to learn all of this, even though AI is good at it, but at a level above executing it, enough to make trade-offs and use judgment when the time comes. Because that part goes faster, it leaves more time and capacity for what matters more outside the design tools: foundational principles, a systematic engineering and architecture mindset, and other general capabilities.
A curious designer can use this from their very first brief. Give AI the task and its context, ask it about the task the way you’d ask a senior coach, and raise your questions straight away. You’ll go into the conversation with your stakeholder with more angles and more considerations, and it shows the work was thought through rather than blindly followed. One question usually raises ten more. Bring the few that are relevant to this task, and keep the rest for yourself, as your own briefs, for your own learning.
That’s how I moved into UX in the first place. My first studio did mostly print and packaging, and when digital banners started coming in, as Australia went through its digital shift, it would have been easy to treat them the way we treated print. While I was designing those banners, I read about how banners work on a website, what role they play there, and how that medium differs from the print work I was used to. I could have treated each one as a simple design task. Those questions are what got me across into UX and UI.
When solutions aren’t scarce anymore, asking good questions is the more valuable skill. A valuable question takes a deep understanding of the concept and the task, and the best ones are the questions the stakeholder hadn’t thought of. Keep questioning a brief and sometimes you’ll find the brief itself was the problem, and the task wasn’t worth doing, or should have been something else entirely.
Not every manager or client wants this. Sometimes people just want the job done, and their priorities may simply sit somewhere else. When you sense that, it’s okay to follow the instructions and keep your questions to yourself. Just don’t let that kind of environment kill your curiosity, and for your own growth, don’t stay in it too long.
And invest in yourself and in the AI tools rather than in courses about AI. Doing your own projects teaches far more than secondhand lessons from other people, and using AI to understand and solve your own hands-on problems is the best way to learn.
