Is my job as a graphic designer under threat?

It really hit me this summer, while I was travelling.

On menus and A-boards outside restaurants, the same type of image kept turning up again and again. Burgers, pizzas, cocktails and durum kebabs with a look I've come to associate with AI-generated graphics.

You could still tell. AI apparently still can't quite manage to make a burger or a durum kebab that actually looks like something you'd want to eat.

But that's probably mostly a matter of time.

Since then I've started noticing it elsewhere too. In Facebook posts, ads and small businesses' marketing. Not necessarily because I can say for certain that something was made with AI, but because a recognisable aesthetic has started to emerge: glossy, over-obvious and slightly more advertisement-like than the sender probably intended.

The interesting part wasn't really whether the images were good or bad.

It was that I suddenly found myself looking at something a graphic designer, illustrator or photographer could previously have been paid to make.

And as a graphic designer, it's hard not to ask the question:

Am I looking at some of my own work?

Making something that looks good has become cheap

A few years ago, a small restaurant basically had three options if it needed an illustration for a menu or a sign.

It could make one itself. It could find some existing stock material. Or it could pay a graphic designer or illustrator to make one.

Now there's a fourth option.

You describe what you want, and shortly after you don't have one proposal, but ten or twenty. If you don't like the result, you try again.

If a small café with no meaningful marketing budget can now get an illustration made that makes its menu more inviting, I find it hard to argue it should have paid a graphic designer instead.

That would mostly be an argument for preserving my own work.

AI has removed a production barrier, and for a lot of people that's a genuine improvement.

But was it ever my job to begin with?

In the short term, I don't actually feel especially threatened.

Because the truth is that a lot of the AI-generated material I see would never have landed on my desk anyway.

The restaurant run by the local football club, putting together a new menu every week, would hardly have called a graphic designer every Thursday before. It simply wouldn't have been worth it.

Maybe they'd have tweaked an old Word document themselves. Maybe the old menu would just have stayed up another week.

Now they can put something new together in a few minutes.

In that case, AI hasn't taken over the graphic designer's work. AI has solved a task that previously wouldn't have been solved at all, because the cost-to-benefit ratio didn't make sense.

But that doesn't mean the market just gets bigger and nobody loses anything.

Once it becomes possible to get graphics made almost for free, it also changes expectations about what graphics ought to cost. A business that previously would have bundled its needs and paid a graphic designer for a larger job can now start solving parts of it itself.

And some of what starts out as work I'd never have gotten anyway can easily drift into territory I used to be paid for.

The line between new work created by AI and old work taken over by AI is therefore not especially sharp.

That's also why I don't feel especially threatened in the short term, even as I can clearly see where the trend is heading.

Some of my old work is under threat

If the brief is:

"Make a nice illustration of a burger we can put on our A-board."

then the need for me is smaller than it was five years ago.

The same goes for variations on an idea. Cutting out images. Extending a photograph. A quick illustration. Different visual directions. Material in several formats.

These are tasks that used to require a person with particular tools and skills, and that can now, in some cases, be solved in a few minutes.

When I was learning graphic work, the tools themselves were a significant part of the skill. You had to know Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

But the craft was never only about operating the software.

It was also about understanding colour management, and knowing what happens when something moves from screen to print. Delivering files with the right colour profiles, cropping and bleed. Handling fonts correctly. Understanding resolution, image formats and different production methods.

And it was about discovering that the text on a sign can't actually be read from the distance it's meant to be seen at. That the contrast is too low. That the logo ends up too small. That the key message gets lost. That something that looks good on my screen doesn't necessarily work on an A-board, a phone, or in print.

In other words, a graphic designer doesn't just deliver a file. Part of the job is understanding where and how it needs to work.

A lot of that knowledge also functioned as a ticket to the work in the first place. Clients paid the graphic designer partly because the graphic designer could do something the client couldn't do themselves.

That ticket has gotten cheaper.

You no longer need to master all of it to produce something that looks professional at first glance.

But you still need a good part of it if the result also has to work once it leaves the screen.

And when far more people can suddenly produce their own graphics, another paradox appears: the results become more individual, while at the same time starting to look like each other.

So why does it still look like something I've seen before?

The possibilities have become close to endless. And yet there's a look that keeps recurring.

Saturated colours. Soft illustrations. Big smiles. Perfect products. Dramatic lighting. Very little randomness.

It all looks right, in a way. Maybe a little too right.

But that's not a new problem.

Stock photos gave us meeting rooms full of unusually happy people. WordPress themes made thousands of businesses end up with roughly the same website. Bootstrap made it possible to build a decent-looking interface without designing every element yourself. Canva made professional-looking layouts available to people who'd never opened InDesign.

AI is another step in that same direction.

The difference is that the result no longer has to be the same template or the same stock photo. Every image can be unique.

And yet they can still feel the same.

There's probably also a geographic bias in this.

A lot of the generative AI we use has been built by American companies for a global market. You can feel it in the aesthetics. The polished, colour-saturated, very explicit visual language often sits closer to international advertising aesthetics than to the more restrained Nordic design tradition I grew up with.

That doesn't mean AI can only produce American-style graphics. You can obviously ask for something else, and the models keep getting better at hitting particular styles, places and cultural references.

But the default suggestion still matters.

If millions of people suddenly get access to a tool that makes a large share of the visual decisions for them, that tool's idea of what "good" looks like also starts to shape the visual landscape around us.

In that sense, the model may be taking on something like the role the template used to have. The difference is just that the template is no longer visible. Two people can get two different images and still end up with something built on roughly the same aesthetic choices.

The result can be unique without necessarily being particularly original.

That's also part of the graphic designer's job that may be becoming more important. Not necessarily producing the alternative, but being able to see when the default doesn't fit. When the local restaurant suddenly looks like an American fast-food chain, or a Danish business ends up with a visual identity that could belong to anyone.

That doesn't necessarily require me to draw the illustration myself. But it does require someone to notice that it's wrong.

That observation also has an expiry date, of course.

The models are getting better at local references, and users are getting better at steering them. In a few years it may become far harder to even talk about a recognisable AI aesthetic.

But right now, I think it's there.

Graphics and graphic design aren't quite the same thing

This is maybe where the real difference lies – between producing and deciding.

AI has gotten very good at producing graphics. But producing something isn't the same as deciding what should be there – or how it should work once it meets reality.

Graphic design has never only been about being able to make what ends up on the page.

What should take up space? What should barely be visible? Who needs to understand it? Can it be read from the distance it's meant to be seen at? What typography suits the setting? Should the tone be humorous, exclusive, cheap, serious or almost invisible?

And maybe the most important question:

Should there even be an image at all?

That's the part of graphic work that's easy to overlook, because the result of a good decision is sometimes precisely that not very much gets made.

AI can help with the decisions too

It would be a bit too convenient to stop the argument there and say that AI produces while the human thinks.

Because AI is getting better at that last part too.

I can already use AI to discuss a layout, suggest directions, critique a composition, find alternatives and question my own choices. It's no longer just an image generator on the other end.

So I don't buy the reassuring version of the story either, where AI takes over the boring work while we humans keep all the creative parts.

The line isn't that neat.

If production has gotten cheaper, there's no particular reason to think judgement and decisions will forever remain ours alone.

From producing to choosing

I've experienced something similar in my work with code.

AI means I can produce more code, faster, than before. So I spend less of my time on the production itself and more on assessing what gets produced.

Is this the right solution? Does it fit with the rest? What's missing? What should be removed? What gets expensive in three years?

Something similar is starting to happen with graphics.

When it becomes cheap to produce ten proposals, it becomes more valuable to be able to see which one is the right one.

Or that all ten are wrong.

The experience doesn't disappear just because production gets easier. It just gets used somewhere else.

That doesn't necessarily move the graphic designer out of the process. It moves where in the process the graphic designer creates value.

A snapshot in time

There's a basic problem with writing an article like this one:

The conclusion has an expiry date.

What AI can do today isn't necessarily what it can do in a year. Some of the things I can point to today as the difference between generating an image and delivering graphic design work, it's going to get better at too.

I'm already seeing the same thing with code.

I wrote about it earlier in From coder to reviewer – how AI has changed the workflow. The starting point there was a line that has stuck with me:

"AI will never get worse than it is now."

The conclusion in that article is that, in the short term, AI doesn't change what I can do – but it changes how I work.

The point isn't that progress necessarily continues in a straight line, or that AI gets better at everything.

The point is that it's dangerous to build your professional identity on the things AI can't do yet.

A year ago, I could point to tasks in my work with code where AI wasn't especially useful. I use AI for some of those today. There's no particularly good reason to think graphics will be any different.

So my conclusions here can only be a snapshot in time.

If I reread this article in two years, there are probably things I currently consider a graphic designer's territory that AI will by then handle without much trouble.

So the interesting question isn't just where the line sits right now.

It's what happens when it moves.

So am I threatened as a graphic designer?

In the short term: not particularly.

Some of the AI-generated graphics I see around me don't represent lost work. They represent work that would never have been commissioned from a graphic designer to begin with.

But parts of my work are under threat.

So when I'm standing in front of that A-board wondering whether I'm looking at some of my own old work, the answer is both yes and no.

Some of the illustrations could have been jobs I'd once have been paid to make. Others only exist because they can now be produced so cheaply that someone decides it's worth doing.

And those two categories are probably going to blur together more and more. Once businesses discover they can solve small graphics tasks themselves, it doesn't necessarily stop at the tasks they'd never have bought in the first place.

Whether AI has, right now, made a burger with slightly odd-looking cheese, or a durum kebab nobody really wants to eat, is unlikely to be what saves the graphic design profession.

It's going to get better.

But there are still some questions left.

Does the image suit the restaurant? Does the place look like itself? Or is it just another unique illustration that still ends up looking like all the others? Can the sign be read from across the street? Does it tie together with the menu, the website and the rest of the experience? And should there have been an illustration there at all?

Once producing an image becomes almost free, the value shifts more towards being able to answer those questions. That's also the work I do myself in visual identity: not just producing the graphics, but deciding what they need to do, and whether they should even be there.

So maybe I'm less threatened as a graphic designer than I am challenged on what it actually means to be one.