Twenty years, three instruments, one job.

The Backbone

I started my apprenticeship as a graphic designer in front of an iMac running QuarkXPress. That wasn’t a personal choice — it was the industry standard. For more than a decade, Quark was the backbone of desktop publishing: books, magazines, brochures, and catalogs, nearly everything that went to print in the late twentieth century, passed through it. Learning to be a designer meant learning Quark first, because there wasn’t really an alternative worth learning.

The Ecosystem

Three years in, I had dropped it almost completely. Not because Quark broke or failed me, but because Adobe offered something structurally different: Creative Suite. It was more affordable, and it brought a versatility no single program could match — instead of one tool, a bundle: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, all built to work together inside one ecosystem.

The affordability got me to try it. The ecosystem is what kept me. Moving between Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign inside the same project gave a designer more power: it widened what I could attempt creatively, and it imposed a production discipline that a single, isolated layout tool never demanded. Fluency across vector work, image retouching, and page layout didn’t just mean speed — it meant more creative range, and a tighter grip on the finished, printable result.

Two Kinds of Designers

That switch taught me something I’ve carried through every tool change since. There are two kinds of designers. Some learn a piece of software and become excellent at operating it — fast, precise, reliable. Others look past the interface, toward the possibilities of the instrument itself: what it can be made to do that the manual never mentions. The first group masters the software. The second masters the medium, and treats whatever software is in front of them as one way, among several, of reaching it.

The New Instrument

Twenty years later, I’m watching the same split repeat itself — this time with AI.

AI is the newest instrument to land on a designer’s desk, and it’s provoking the same divide. Some use it like a faster filter: a shortcut for a task they’d otherwise do by hand, one prompt standing in for one click. Others are using it to change what the process looks like altogether.

In my own practice, I run one or several AI agents against the parts of a project that used to consume the most time while asking the least creativity of me: sorting and captioning a large image archive, a first pass of color correction across a batch of scans, drafting boilerplate copy for a brief before I rewrite it in my own voice, mapping a market or a competitor’s visual language before a pitch, scaffolding the code behind an interactive prototype. None of that is the creative work. All of it used to steal time from the creative work.

What that frees up isn’t spare time. It’s room for art direction — the part of the job that’s actually about taste, judgment, and a point of view. The instrument doesn’t make the creative decisions. It clears the desk so I can spend more of the day making them.

Tailored

This is also where the tool-versus-instrument split shows up most clearly in how I actually work with AI, day to day. I don’t direct it the same way twice. A website isn’t a brochure. A book isn’t a magazine. A research questionnaire isn’t a case study. Each medium carries its own constraints, audience, and production logic — and directing an AI agent well means tailoring the brief to the medium, the same way I’d choose different Adobe tools, or different paper stock, depending on what I was making.

I’ve used Claude as a collaborator across most of these: architecting and writing my own studio website from the ground up; laying out brochures, books, and magazine spreads; and building a tailored Art Direction discovery questionnaire for a prospective client in the Gulf — a research instrument that had to ask exactly the right questions, in exactly the right order, to be useful at all. In every case the process is the same: I set the direction, the standards, and the judgment calls. The agent handles structure, drafts, and iteration at a speed no single person could match alone.

That’s not a threat to the discipline I picked up moving off Quark. It’s an extension of it.

The Job Doesn’t Change

QuarkXPress, Adobe Creative Suite, and now AI: three instruments, built decades apart, for three different problems. What hasn’t changed is the split I noticed as an apprentice. There are designers who run software. There are designers who direct instruments. I’ve spent twenty years trying to stay in the second group.

The instrument keeps changing.

That was always the point.