Is it always about the tool?

Designers love tools. From Photoshop to Figma, and now AI, tools have always been the first thing many designers jump to. And it’s natural: a new tool shows up, the industry rallies around it, and soon it becomes tradition… even a requirement. If you want to stay relevant, you learn it.

And over time, the industry starts shifting the way it evaluates designers. People begin asking: are you a designer, or just someone who knows the tool? It isn’t enough to be “good at Figma.” Designers are increasingly judged on the process they follow, their ability to frame problems clearly, and their judgment in choosing solutions that makes the impact.

Tools come and go. Skill is supposed to stay.

And yet, here we are again.

Every few weeks there are new AI design tools, new workflows, new prompts, new “must-learn” features. And lo and behold, designers are falling in love with tools again. Which brings back the same question we’ve been asking for years:

Is it always about the tool?

Yes, tools matter and they always have. It has always been the medium for us to express our craft, our thinking and our "taste". For designers who love the craft, tools have always been a favorite assistant. The real differentiator isn’t the tool itself, it’s the designer’s judgment: knowing what to build, why it matters, and which tool (or method) gets you there the fastest.

AI makes this conversation even more intense because it changes something designers have struggled with for a long time: being valued compared to business and engineering.

Usually, its the business who gets the first buy-in as they speak the language of revenue and strategy -- the sales team has the executive backed up right from the begining. Engineering gets valued because they can turn ideas into real working products -- its where the "hard work" of building a product happens; the make-it-or-break-it moment. Designers often end up stuck in the middle, translating business requirements (and user needs) into mockups and hoping the value is understood. And in a lot of corporates, design can be treated like something “anyone can do,” especially when it’s reduced to just the visual representation of business' ideas and artifacts for engineering to refer to.

But that wasn’t always the norm. In the 2000s, “designers who code” (or frontend designer/developers) were common. But through the 2010s, as design specific tools started gaining momentum with people advocating "design thinking", the industry leaned hard into a cleaner split: designers don’t need to code; they research, 'understand the user', define, and design while engineers build.

That split worked… until it didn’t.

Because even when designers did great research and designed great flows, many still struggled with two things: getting business folks to agree to their 'user-centered, ethical' solution, and fitting in their proposed solutions into what engineering team could sprint at a time.

But this is where AI changes the game, not because it makes designers replace engineers (or the vice-versa), but because it gives designers more execution leverage. (And to some extent, its taking designers to what they were supposed to do: understand the code behind the things they build.)

But notice what this still comes back to.

It’s still “about the tool,” in the same way Figma was. First obsession, then normalization. Eventually, AI tools will become normal. Anyone will be able to use them. And we’ll ask the same question again: “Are you just an AI designer?” The tool will stop being the differentiator.

So what does differentiate designers?

Call it judgment. Call it taste. Call it intuition. Whatever the industry names it next, it’s the same underlying skill: product thinking, the ability to understand users, business constraints, and real-world tradeoffs, and still make decisions that lead to outcomes.

Because there will always be a new tool to master.