Authorship Over Output

Why does everything look the same?

That’s what Milton Glaser asked me in his studio as I eagerly showed him a new tool called Pinterest in 2012. Over the sounds of the playground next door and the occasional slam of a kickball against the window, Glaser often lamented how design was changing. It was becoming less diverse, less idiosyncratic since his glory days in the 1970s. The computer, he forever argued, was accelerating the sameness.

Jump cut to today, and I’m staring head-tilted at a candidate’s design portfolio that isn’t just AI-coded, but AI-written with AI-generated designs, and I’m thinking: Milton would hate this.

After more than a decade of over-fragmenting design into hyper-specific roles (UX, UI, Content, Research, etc.), analysts are now pointing out the plateauing of open design roles since 2023 while acknowledging a wholesale reinvention of design titles: Frankenjobs are rearranging the very definition of design. Between the accelerating sameness and the shifting language around what we do, the big challenge in creating a design organization at Brain Co. has been deciding what to even call Design.

Back to basics

Our first step was to re-evaluate the career ladder for designers. In creative agencies, brand boutiques, and editorial teams going back to the printing press, designers followed a guild track: designer to art director to creative director and so on. Craft and leadership were a symbiotic partnership that improved one another.

“You should always teach,” Glaser said to me. He was 83 with decades of teaching experience under his belt. I was a graduate student who was still getting used to being called a designer at work. But on faith, I did. And over 15 years, I came to value how students challenged my practice and made it better. Mentoring and guiding students shaped my development in a way senior individual contributor (IC) roles at day jobs rarely did.

You see, in tech, a bifurcated model was created for postwar engineering orgs: choose to make or to manage. Parity between design and engineering disciplines then overrode important considerations for how designers work. At other tech companies today, a senior IC designer’s growth is capped to sub-executive because of their lack of management experience — despite it being the ladder’s own rules that deny them this experience. In a contest between the senior IC and Design Manager, the manager holds the purse strings to everyone’s raises, bonuses, and promotions. So the senior IC always loses. In exchange, Design Managers lose touch with their craft when their performance reviews don’t ask about it, making it tough for them to evaluate how long it should take designers to do things and what tools could be used to push their work further, essentially kneecapping their ability to coach well. With the advent of “SuperICs,” many wonderful Design Managers I know are struggling to find work, having been forced to specialize out of making.

The argument often made was that some people weren’t cut out to be managers and so shouldn’t be forced to choose that path. That’s true. But it forms career paths around an exception rather than building for those who grow by teaching.

At Brain Co., we went back to basics: a unified career path that gives designers the chance to grow in craft and leadership together.

While new titles like Design Engineer are being applied very inconsistently (sometimes it’s a Front-end Engineer with Claude Design and sometimes it’s a Designer with Cursor), we’re eschewing the titles for now (Design Engineer, SuperICs, Principals, Managers, all of them) and calling these roles something Milton Glaser would recognize: Designers.

Our designers are still using AI tools of course, but it doesn’t change their title. We don’t call them Pencil Designers when they sketch on notepads either.

Headcount

In the apps era, many design-led organizations settled around a designer-to-engineer ratio of 1:8. It was the right balance to give designers plenty of screens to make while also just enough free time to envision future evolutions of the product and to plan for big leaps forward.

We follow a similar path but with one important exception: AI/ML Engineers don’t count toward this ratio. The reasoning is that model throughput doesn’t always generate design surface area. So we count designers against product engineer ratios only.

This ratio is generous by some standards, especially compared to many enterprise software orgs, but we have a higher design bar than many of them.

Owning more also means a few more owners.

What we lose, willingly

We have focused on bringing in generalists and founding designers. This has been perfect for our ambitious and fast-moving pods. And it also speaks to the spirit of some of our design heroes: California-based design duo Charles and Ray Eames were unbound in their creativity pursuing World’s Fair exhibits, film documentaries, furniture, medical equipment, whole houses, and simple toys. We want designers to embrace the full range of problem-solving capabilities: research, sketching, prototyping, coding, motion, branding, critique, strategy, and more. As Charles said: “Eventually everything connects.”

The tradeoff is that we don’t have specialists. No one just draws gray boxes and waits for someone else to fill them in. No one just talks to users but waits on someone else to pitch the product experience.

We all do all the work.

The other cost is time. Hiring is slower because generalists with real craft are rarer. That’s where you come in.

For design here at Brain Co., authorship is the most defining word we could use. We expect total authorship of ideas and of execution, no matter the latest tool. Letting the medium, be it Pinterest or Claude, do too much of the work results in a sea of sameness. Investing in individual authorship helps keep design fresh and effective.

A design portfolio that uses AI is fine, great even. But extra effort needs to be made to show authorship over output. 250 carefully authored words of a case study beat 5,000 generated ones. Showing the discarded ideas and sketches and AI suggestions is far more valuable than an animating vibe-coded prototype.

A designer shows evidence of decision-making, not just veneer or volume.

If that aligns with your own values, you should give us a ring. We’re always looking for more great people to work with. And if you’re looking for more information on how we measure authorship, you can check in next month.