The Roundup: The Great Collapse and a New Era In Design
Insights from recent Design Better interviews
This past October, we had the opportunity to gather our Design Better Experts in Residence for a conversation at Sequoia Capital. This is an amazing group of people, ranging from Irene Au who helped design the first commercial internet browser for Netscape, to Kevin Bethune who had a unique career journey from nuclear engineer to designer for Nike, to James Buckhouse who led a creative career working on films like Shrek and The Matrix before becoming a Design Partner at Sequoia.
In this edition of The Roundup, we’re exploring the themes we discussed during our conversation with Irene, Kevin, and James: how design roles are collapsing, tools are becoming more powerful, and yet the most valuable work we do will still rely on human hands and our appreciation for natural beauty.
We’ll end the article with tactical tips from James Buckhouse on how to use your design system and React component library to make GenAI tools more efficient and consistent by creating what he calls a “natural language CSS.”
Listen to our conversation with Irene Au, Kevin Bethune, and James Buckhouse: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack
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The Great Collapse: When Specialists Become Generalists
Irene Au reflected on three decades of watching design roles evolve—and recently, compress:
“When I started my career, you had very clear specialists. You had backend engineers, frontend engineers, interaction designers, visual designers, illustrators, user researchers. Somewhere along the way, there’s this desire to have people with blended skills. Product managers are doing more user research. We’ve witnessed the blending of interaction design and visual design into product design. And now there’s this new job title: design engineers.”
The driver isn’t just efficiency, it’s necessity. Kevin Bethune notes that in startups especially, “everyone’s wearing so many hats anyway, we cared less about titles, just getting the work done.”
But Irene offers an important caveat: “I think we’ve had this longstanding debate—should designers know how to code? You don’t have to in order to be a successful designer, but if you do know how to code and you can design well, you’re going to be that much more valuable.”
