The Future Looks Good

2025-12-15

Over the years, I’ve built a number of web apps and tools. They worked. They solved problems. They did what they were supposed to do.

But they never quite felt finished.

There was always that last 10% missing, the polish that makes something feel intentional, professional, trustworthy. The part that users don’t explicitly ask for, but absolutely notice when it’s not there.

I treated that gap as mostly a tooling or time problem. If I just had better components, better templates, more time, or a designer on hand, it would be fine.

But that was only half true. The real issue wasn’t tools. It was taste, judgment, and understanding why things look good when they do.

AI Changes the Floor, Not the Ceiling

AI is going to make it dramatically easier to build things. Soon, arguably already, anyone will be able to say “I want a nice-looking website” and get something that’s clean, usable, and broadly acceptable.

That’s a real shift. And it’s a good one.

But it doesn’t eliminate design any more than IKEA eliminated furniture design. IKEA made furniture accessible. Affordable. Easy to assemble. And as a result, millions of people could suddenly furnish their homes.

What it didn’t do was make all furniture design irrelevant.

Custom carpenters still exist. Interior designers still exist. High-end furniture still exists. In fact, their role arguably became clearer: they weren’t competing on access anymore, but on taste, quality, and intent.

AI does the same thing for software and interfaces.

AI raises the floor. It does not lower the ceiling.

How not to be a Luddite

This isn’t about rejecting AI or clinging to the past.

I don’t want to be the person deciding to design ornate saddles, just as the automobile arrives.

The future is AI-assisted. That’s obvious. The question is how you relate to those tools.

If all you can do is operate a tool, you’re replaceable by a better tool. If you understand why something works, you gain leverage as tools improve.

That difference matters.

Knowing design principles means:

• You can imagine what could exist, not just accept what’s generated
• You can evaluate 50 AI outputs and know which one is right, and why
• You can push, refine, remix, and redirect instead of settling
• You can communicate intent clearly, both to humans and machines

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“Make this look good” is a weak prompt. Knowing what “good” means makes it powerful.

Minimalism Isn’t the Enemy

Another common idea is that modern design is “too minimalist,” and that we’ve lost something essential.

But minimalism wasn’t a rejection of craft, it was often a reaction to:

• Poor typography
• Overloaded interfaces
• Technical constraints
• Low-resolution screens
• Bad defaults

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As constraints change, aesthetics change too.

We’re already seeing richer motion, better typography, more expressive layouts, and more personality creeping back in, especially where performance and tooling allow it.

AI will accelerate this, not suppress it.

When it’s cheap to try things, people try more things.

Interfaces Aren’t Going Away

There’s another argument you hear a lot lately:

User interfaces will “disappear” as everything moves to AI assistants.

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I partially agree.

Yes, it’s great if an AI can deal with 20 pages of airline booking forms on my behalf. That’s not a UX problem; it’s a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

But humans still have eyes. Screens still exist. Visual information is still one of the fastest, richest ways to communicate.

Even if an AI books your flight, you’ll still want to:

• See the options
• Compare tradeoffs
• Understand outcomes
• Notice anomalies
• Build trust

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That requires interfaces.

They may change shape. They may become calmer, more contextual, more ambient. But they won’t vanish.

VR, AR, and the Shape of the Future

This is also why I’ve never bought into the idea of a world where everyone lives inside VR headsets.

A future where people sit isolated, sealed off from the physical world, interacting primarily through virtual environments feels dystopian, not aspirational.

Augmented reality, on the other hand, makes much more sense.

Information layered onto the real world. Context added, not replaced. Digital tools that enhance presence instead of removing it.

Imagine your phone’s information simply appearing when you need it, a message, a reminder, a map, without pulling you out of the world.

But even in that future, what’s floating in front of you is still a UI.

It still needs hierarchy. It still needs clarity. It still needs restraint. It still needs design.

Different medium. Same principles.

Design as Durable Knowledge

One of the things that draws me to design, especially visual and motion design, is that it produces durable artifacts.

A design can sit untouched for years and still be understood. It doesn’t rely on servers running. It doesn’t quietly rot because a dependency was deprecated. It doesn’t disappear when something is shut down.

Even when styles age, the thinking remains visible, and importantly, understanding design compounds.

It makes you better at:

• Directing AI
• Evaluating outputs
• Building products
• Communicating intent
• Imagining better futures

The Future Looks Great

I don’t think we’re heading toward a bland, uniform world where everything looks the same.

I think we’re heading toward a world where:

• The baseline quality is higher
• The tools are more powerful
• The differentiation comes from judgment, taste, and imagination

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AI will make it easier to build things. Design will determine whether those things are worth building.

And that’s why I’m optimistic.

The future has never been more exciting and I'm going to be a part of shaping how it looks.

Follow me on X (@EridianAlpha) and check out my design progress at DesignedTo.Work.