What a Year of Writing 'Design Amplified' Has Taught Me
On New Year’s Day of 2025, I sat down to write a hopeful little post called “To new beginnings and a bright year ahead”. I was looking at a photo I’d taken in Big Sur—a quiet morning ocean, grey-blue and steady—and trying to convince myself the year might feel like that: expansive, maybe even calm.
It did not.
2025 became the year of whiplash. AI went from “interesting side project” to “if it’s not in your roadmap, what are you even doing?” Every other day seemed to bring a new think piece announcing that design was dead, reborn, automated, or somehow all three at once.
Somewhere in that turbulence, I started this blog Design Amplified, if I’m honest, was less a brand strategy and more a coping mechanism. I chose the name because this era demands more from designers than execution. It asks us to lead through ambiguity, translate emerging technology, and design not just products but our own path forward. Design Amplified is my way of examining how design can grow louder, clearer, and more influential. Looking back over the year of posts now, I can see that I wasn’t just writing about tools or trends. I was documenting my particular moment in history: the feeling of being a working designer at the very start of the AI era, trying to stay both useful and human.
A Second Internet Moment
Early in the year, I wrote “Digital Déjà Vu: From Dot-Com to AI, A Designer’s Tale of Two Revolutions”. It started with a memory: those disoriented print designers of 1999 learning HTML for the first time, watching their picas and crop marks dissolve into viewports and tables. We didn’t call it “upskilling” back then. We just felt like the floor had moved. In 2025, I realized I was watching the same movie again with different costumes. Back then, we argued about whether every business really needed a website. This year, I found myself in eerily similar conversations about whether every product really needed AI.
“Roy Amara’s Long Shadow: The Futurist Who Saw AI Coming” helped me name what I was sensing. Amara’s Law is simple: we overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. I applied that lens to AI: right now we’re drowning in short-term overestimation—spectacular demos, overwrought press releases, “AI strategy” decks that say very little. But underneath, the long-term underestimation is already forming: the quiet ways AI will rewire our tools, teams, and expectations of what designers actually do.
That “second internet moment” became the backdrop for everything I wrote this year. It’s hard to pretend this is just another incremental change when history is standing in your doorway, reminding you what it felt like to design the early web with a dial-up modem.
From Seamless to Honest
Design, as a discipline, has been obsessed with removing friction for as long as I can remember. “Don’t make me think” was our unofficial motto. In an AI world, I’m no longer sure that’s always wise.
In “Designing for Dragons: The New Rules of AI UX”, I wrote that a very confident model can be seamlessly wrong. The smoother the interface, the more dangerous the hallucination or spiraling delusion. When the system talks like a human, is praisingly sycophantic, and “sounds” intelligent, it’s easy to forget that there is no mind behind the words—just probabilities and pattern matching.
That realization pushed my writing in a different direction. I became less interested in AI as a novelty and more interested in how it reshapes trust. In “Designing for Trust, Not Just Transactions”, I argued that the real job in AI-powered e-commerce isn’t to make people click “Buy” more often; it’s to make them feel informed and in control in a system that is increasingly opaque.
That’s not what most AI pitches are about right now. The incentives push us toward more personalization, more automation, more “delight.” But if this year taught me anything, it’s that we can’t keep optimizing for frictionless experiences while ignoring the small fractures in trust underneath.
Creativity in a World Optimized for Sameness
If the AI posts were about the future, a different set of essays were about something more immediate and uncomfortable: the present sameness of design.
In “The Creative Courage Manifesto: Breaking Free from a World Optimized for Sameness”, I tried to write the thing I hadn’t quite admitted to myself: that a lot of what we call “good design” now is just well-polished conformity. The same safe landing pages, the same neutral palettes, the same rounded rectangles, all A/B tested to a comforting average.
That piece wasn’t subtle. I talked about algorithms quietly acting as art directors, templates turning into cages, and the danger of letting data veto any idea that doesn’t fit the current pattern. The response told me I wasn’t alone. Many designers can feel the edges closing in, even if their dashboards are up and to the right.
“The Creative AI Paradox: Threat, Tool, or Renaissance?” pushed the tension further. AI, I wrote, can make our work more generic or more generative. It can flood the world with derivative output—or it can let us explore ten directions before lunch and find a path we never would have seen on our own.
The uncomfortable part is that the tool doesn’t decide which it becomes. We do. If we use AI to speed up hitting the same patterns, we’ll get there. If we use it to widen our aperture and then apply taste, judgment, and risk-taking on top, we have a shot at something like a creative renaissance.
When the Ladder Stops Protecting You
If this had been a calmer year, maybe Design Amplified would have stayed comfortably in the space of ideas and metaphors. The market didn’t allow it.
“Signals in the Noise: What Q1 2025 Tells Us About UX Hiring” was my attempt to read the room honestly. The comforting narrative—do good work, climb the ladder, you’ll be safe—had clearly broken. Titles that once felt like shields were suddenly just text on LinkedIn profiles.
So I turned to something more constructive: if the ladder doesn’t hold, what does? “Career Karma: Why Leaders Learn, Network, and Publish” answered that with three simple habits: keep learning, keep building real relationships, and keep sharing what you know. I called it “Career Karma” because it works like compounding interest. You don’t know when those investments will matter, but you can be sure that, at some point, they will.
There’s a line from “Leadership Isn’t About Waving a Baton—It’s About Showing Up When It’s Hard” that still feels like the core of how I want to work: leadership isn’t always about the loudest voice or the fanciest title. Sometimes it’s just about showing up, doing the hard thing, and genuinely caring about the people around you. In a year when titles proved fragile, that definition of leadership held up better than any org chart.
Designing Products, Designing a Career
As the months went on, the line between writing about products and writing about careers blurred.
“Ship Yourself: How Designers Are Creating New Careers” probably made that most explicit. I wrote that careers aren’t ladders anymore; they’re products you create, iterate, and launch. For some people that sounded glib. For me, it was the most honest way to describe what I was seeing.
You can’t A/B test a life, but you can treat it with the same care you bring to a complex design problem: understand your users (the people you serve), be clear about the problems you’re good at solving, test your story in the market, and keep iterating when the feedback doesn’t match your expectations.
“Designing AI with Purpose: My MIT Certification & Capstone on MemoryMate” was one way I tried to do that. The course and the MemoryMate project—an AI companion for seniors with early cognitive decline—weren’t just about adding “AI” to my skill set. They were about staying close to the work: grappling with data, ethics, and real human needs instead of talking about AI in slides.
If there’s a quiet thread running under all these posts, it’s this: the skills that make you a good designer—empathy, clarity, experimentation, honest feedback loops—are the same skills you need to design a resilient career.
The Rise of the Super IC
One of the patterns that jumped out as I talked to hiring managers and peers was how many companies were looking for a very specific kind of designer. Not a pure manager. Not a heads-down execution machine. Something in between.
In “The Rise of the Super IC Designer: A Revolution at the Intersection of Craft and Vision”, I explored that new role I first talked about in 2025. The "Super IC" is a senior individual contributor who operates like a product leader without giving up the craft. Someone who can sit in a strategy review with executives in the morning and be in Figma, prototyping a new interaction, that afternoon.
Crucially, this role is also the one most naturally amplified, not threatened, by AI. Super ICs tend to be the people who see tools like large language models and generative design not as shortcuts to avoid thinking, but as leverage to think wider and move faster. They treat AI like a very fast junior: helpful, fallible, always supervised.
Stop Treating AI Like Cheating
By the time I wrote “Stop Treating AI Like Cheating on Your Homework: A Playbook for AI-Native Design Teams” at the end of November, the threads of the year had started to braid together.
The piece starts with a simple observation: many designers I’ve worked with this year will quietly open a model to clean up an email or summarize notes—but when it’s time for the “real work,” they close the tab and go back to their old process. When you ask why, you don’t hear ignorance. You hear shame. It feels like cheating.
The homework metaphor runs deep. We were taught that copying is the worst sin, that using outside help is suspicious. Admitting that an AI system helped draft a brief or explore layout options feels, to some people, like confessing a lack of originality.
What This Year Leaves Me With
Looking back now, my posts on Design Amplified don’t feel like standalone essays. They feel like chapters of one longer story:
A designer who started his career at the dawn of the commercial web finds himself, decades later, at the start of another technological shift. The tools are different; the questions aren’t. What is our work, really? How do we stay useful without becoming generic? How do we protect trust in systems that can do so much and explain so little?
I don’t have tidy answers. But I’m more convinced of a few things than I was a year ago:
We’re in a second internet moment, and design’s role is up for negotiation. We can either become the function that polishes AI outputs, or the discipline that questions AI’s inputs and explains its behavior. Only one of those will matter in the long run.
Trust has become the core interaction. Whether you’re designing a shopping flow or a memory companion for seniors, the real question is: why should anyone rely on this? For how long? Under what conditions?
Careers now reward motion more than stasis. Learning, connecting, and publishing aren’t side projects. They’re part of the work. The ladder is shaky. The habits are not.
And creative courage still matters. Maybe more than ever. In a world of prompts, templates, and dashboards, originality will not happen by accident. Someone has to insist on it.
When I look back on 2025, I won’t remember it as the year AI “finally stuck.” I’ll remember it as the year a lot of us quietly decided whether we were going to design this next era with intention—or let it happen to us.
Design Amplified started as my way of choosing the former. If you’ve been reading along, you’ve been part of that choice too.
What have been some big learnings for you in 2025?
