‘Almost everyone is having an existential crisis’: Designers share how they’re surviving an industry in constant flux

Дата публикации: 29-07-2026 09:00:00

In 2018, Cari Sekendur relocated from New York City to Berlin, Germany to launch an independent web design and branding studio, Butter. Like many designers who leave salaried employment to work for themselves, Sekendur was seeking greater independence and a sense of creative freedom. An entrepreneur at heart, she wanted to wear many hats beyond graphic design—including marketing, pitching to clients, building freelance teams, and developing the systems that keep a studio ticking along.
The move paid off. Butter is a well-established boutique studio of one, boasting clients like Nike, Puma, and the Morgans Hotel Group; and Sekendur has achieved the flexible lifestyle she long hoped for. 
“I really prefer to have the autonomy of controlling my time,” she says. “I love the freedom.”
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Over the last eight years, the design industry has weathered a succession of storms, from the pandemic and political upheaval to broader industry shifts like design expertise moving in-house and the acquisition of smaller studios by larger strategy firms. But for Sekendur, it’s only been in the last year specifically—with the acceleration of generative AI—that she has noticed a fundamental shift in her daily business operations and its economics.
“I’m suddenly having to pitch for projects that I wouldn’t have prioritized in the past,” says Sekendur. “Some of them I wouldn’t have even considered before, because of how low they’re paid. Budgets have gotten significantly smaller, maybe like 50% or more than they were even last year.” 
According to Sekendur, clients are also taking far longer to move forward with a commission (it now takes “two months, not two weeks”). Project scopes have been stripped back, with services such as copywriting, illustration, and photography—which Butter once supplied and built teams around—disappearing from scopes of work entirely. 
“I’m very concerned about the big picture and what is going to happen,” says Sekendur. “Everything’s in such an unstable state.”
Across ten interviews with designers, agents, creative coaches, and industry leaders as well as a survey of nearly 1,300 independent designers conducted earlier this month, the same story emerges again and again: Freelancing in 2026 is fundamentally different than it was even a year ago. 
In this story, designers explain:
How career ambitions (and income) have changed over the last year
Why AI has changed designers’ relationships with clients and employers—and what to do about it
The career advice that helps designers navigate uncertainty
A Whole New Game
From San Francisco, Kat Koh works as a creative career coach, advising creatives who she says, “look successful, but feel unfulfilled.” She is warm, empathetic, and curious; it is unsurprising to learn that her clients refer to her as “a career therapist.” When Koh first began working with designers, creative directors, and illustrators more than a decade ago—a time she describes as a “fairly prosperous period to be freelancing”—her sessions were largely built around helping individuals figure out what kind of designer they wanted to be.
“A lot of my clients were telling me at the time, ‘I’m making a living, but I feel very pigeonholed,’” she recalls. Koh helped them puzzle out questions like, How do I market myself beyond what I’ve become known for? Should I niche? Do I pivot? Where do I go next? “I was hearing from a lot of people who actually had time to think about what they really wanted to do,” she says.
Jumping ahead to 2026, Koh says that the questions that now arise in her sessions have shifted dramatically. “Almost everyone is having an existential crisis,” she says. Instead of refining their independent practice, many are questioning whether they should remain in the profession at all. 
“What I hear… is more just a kind of deep fear. A lot of them right now are worried about how their physical bodies are going to pay rent.” This brings Koh a lot of sadness: “I want them to be worried about whether their soul is thriving.” 
Sekendur frames this fear as emerging from “the pandemic, inflation, and now AI… It’s just one huge thing almost every year that really shakes the industry,” she says. 
AI is the—very large—last straw, so to speak. In Fast Company’s report, more than half of designers surveyed believe AI is undercutting their rates, and 68% believe it is eroding the value of human creativity.
[Source Images: vejaa/Adobe Stock]
“Clients now expect more while paying less,” wrote one survey respondent on AI’s effect on the industry. “Many clients are taking advantage of AI to underestimate our professionalism and pricing,” said another. 
While only 22% said they have lost work because of AI, Sekendur and others have a far more nuanced sense of AI’s impact on their life as a freelancer. AI isn’t replacing design, but it is changing how clients perceive it. 
As Sekendur says: “I feel like I’m charging less because AI has shifted how people think.” Independent art director and illustrator Eric Carter makes an apt comparison: “The desktop computer did not replace graphic design and neither will artificial intelligence,” he says. “But it will change it.”
The Change We Feared
In Birmingham, England, Luke Tonge runs an independent design practice while also organizing an annual design festival, Birmingham Design Festival, and heading up a co-working space that keeps him at the heart of the city’s creative community. Design is more than Tonge’s bread and butter; it is his lifestyle and an industry from which he has built community. 
Like 65% of respondents to the Fast Company survey, Tonge started freelancing after more than a decade working as a salaried employee at a design agency. Although being laid off accelerated the transition, freelancing was something he had long wanted to do, and looking back, he says he never truly felt at home in the agency world.
“I felt I was part of an industry that I didn’t really fit into,” says Tonge, describing the alcohol-fueled, work-hard/play-hard lifestyle of British design agencies. Freelancing, by contrast, gave him a sense of fulfillment he had long been missing. “Very quickly, I realized that the freedom and flexibility and joy quota was way higher,” he says. 
Over the past year, Tonge has watched the creative landscape change around him in ways he had not seen before. Initially, he wasn’t sure whether the industry’s anxiety around AI reflected genuine change or collective panic. “It was really hard to tell,” says Tonge, “Is this fear of change, or has change actually come into effect?”  
Then the redundancies began. “Last summer, there were agency staff based here at the co-working space who lost work directly because of AI,” he says. “I saw that on a week-by-week basis of people saying, ‘Can I come and see you? I’ve been made redundant. Are there any jobs going?’”
What began as a fear, says Tonge, has become tangible. “This is a very real thing. This isn’t just people getting laid off who are not very good. These are my peers who are now really struggling and they’re not getting the work that they used to get.” 
Yet Tonge is careful not to attribute every redundancy to artificial intelligence alone. “I think a lot of companies now are using AI as an excuse for layoffs when really… it’s just a numbers thing,” he says. Having experienced corporate layoffs himself, he is skeptical of the promise of employment as a refuge from uncertainty. 
“It’s unhealthy to believe that the company will always have your back,” he says. “The higher ups, especially, they just care about their bottom line.”
Tonge’s reflection reveals a contradiction that has always been at the heart of the creative economy, but has become sharply magnified in 2026. While freelancing is uncertain, salaried employment, especially in the time of AI, is also uncertain. For many designers today, the choice between independent practices and employment is not simply a choice between risk and security, but between an uncertainty that they directly manage or an uncertainty where decisions are being made by superiors. 
“I’d rather be at the helm of my own sinking ship,” says one independent designer of the tradeoffs between freelancing and salaried employment. “At least that way, I can sink while abiding by my own ethics.”  
Human Values
When Nike Kushick (who uses they/them pronouns) graduated from design school in Munich in 2022, they never expected to land a salaried design job. Heading into the working world without a firm plan, they initially scraped together income by working on the UX of an indie game for friends, but they ended up applying for a paid medical trial to cover rent while figuring out what to do next.
An opportunity arrived through their extended network, when a mutual friend mentioned an opening at the creative studio where she worked and encouraged Kushick to apply. “I didn’t have the guts to send out an application though,” Kushick recalls. Instead, the company reached out to them. “My friend had told them I would apply . . . and they thought I would be a match.”
At first, the role felt like a good fit. Kushick admired the agency’s attention to detail. But toward the start of 2025, they observed a radical change in the studio’s approach. 
“About the time when the company shifted towards being an AI-forward company, I started to lose my passion,” they say. Work that had once relied on an individual’s talent became increasingly centered on AI prompts. “Something that was previously done by a 3D designer would now be done by a 3D designer prompting something.” Most independent designers, similarly, have had to embed AI into their practice: According to Fast Company’s survey, only 10.92% say they never use AI. 
For Kushick, the issue wasn’t about new technology—something they themselves embrace in their work—but what the new technology did to the creative process. “The final output did not feel like it was my own,” they say. They also struggled with the ethical implications of using generative AI. “I always had in the back of my head how much water I am using, how many amazing artists’ work I’m stealing, and I don’t even know who I’m stealing from.”
Their experience resonates with one survey respondent’s concern for future generations: “We should be more worried about our younger creatives . . . It’s important that as more senior creatives we are helping to mentor their critical thinking skills and teaching them the importance of strategy and craft so they aren’t understanding a creative career as purely visual output.”
As the studio embraced AI, Kushick says that the pace of work accelerated and the pressure intensified—a finding seen across industries. “Clients now have an unrealistic expectation towards the speed at which thoughtful design takes,” one designer wrote when surveyed. Another: “[AI] distorts clients’ impressions of how long certain tasks should take.” Another: “Clients expect more ideas faster, and for less money,” and “people expect great things in minutes.” 
As Beth Pickens, an artist consultant based out of Los Angeles, says: “We live in a culture that wants content, but doesn’t care about the people who make anything. That’s always been true, but now it’s at hyper speed.”
For Kushick, the acceleration led to burnout. Eventually, they were signed off on medical leave, before deciding to quit the agency altogether. Now, they are considering what comes next, remaining open to either freelancing or salaried employment if the right opportunity presents itself. For them, what matters most isn’t employment status; it’s about finding an environment where human craft—and time—is appreciated. 
“I saw a job opening for a designer for a community garden,” says Kushick. “This is something I can imagine doing. I don’t want to work for tech companies anymore.” 
Shared Values
Every designer interviewed for this piece wanted to talk about AI. It’s the big question mark that designers are grappling with at this moment. And across all interviews, one discipline was repeatedly singled out as particularly vulnerable to AI: illustration. Countless Instagram posts by illustrators in the last year have also attested to the decline of illustration gigs. 
One former independent designer who recently returned to salaried employment as a creative director observed that her company is no longer “hiring the freelance copywriter or the freelance illustrator.” Survey respondents reported a similar trend: “Small projects for freelancers <$1000 are going to AI instead,” wrote one. Another says: “People are using AI instead of artists to do custom illustrations, videos, photo collages, paintings, etc.,” while a third describes “generating custom artwork for a client with no budget to hire an illustrator.”
[Source Images: Natali_Mias/Adobe Stock, vejaa/Adobe Stock]
Eric Carter, an illustrator whose clients include The New York Times, believes the disruption has been most acute at the lower end of the market. “There is this whole gig economy of illustrators doing smaller jobs,” he says from his studio in Los Angeles. “Fiverr was already cheapening everything… the bottom was already pretty low. And then having AI replace that, it just cut it out.” 
Carter has been insulated from that shift because, as he puts it, “I get paid to think.” This idea—that a designer’s value is increasingly about their taste and approach as opposed to pure craft or technical ability—reverberates throughout the freelance industry. “You can’t automate taste and creativity,” one survey respondent wrote. Another: “Ideas and taste is what is needed to succeed.” And another: “AI is only as good as the strategy and input.”
Other interviewees describe a different, increasingly valuable kind of protection to their freelance careers: shared values. Sarah Epperson, an illustrator in Los Angeles who specializes in social justice campaigning, works predominantly with progressive political organizations and non-profits. She hasn’t noticed any change in her income with the advent of AI and believes that people continue to commission her because doing so aligns with their principles. 
“I just think that they know that [using AI is] so counterintuitive to everything that they believe in,” she says, a contrast that can be seen in the Republicans’ embrace of AI in opposition to New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s celebration of human-led campaigns. “It’s way more about, like, ‘We want to hire you because of who you are and what you’ve done,’ not just, ‘We just want this quick flashy thing.’” 
Designer Kelli Anderson has noticed a similar shift in the design space. “The clients who are currently hiring artists, it almost seems like it’s a political move for them to treat them well and pay you well,” she says. 
What interviewees describe is a split in the market: There are clients who appreciate what a designer can bring to the table, and there are those that see it as a business expense that can be minimized. “AI is the new litmus test to see how someone values design,” wrote one of the survey’s respondents. 
The New Normal 
Kat Irannejad, director of visual artist management company Totally Reps, says the biggest change that she has observed for freelancers is the growing need to stitch together multiple sources of income across a variety of services. 
“Many artists are doing everything from teaching to going to artist fairs… selling prints online . . . They really have had to learn to diversify where income is coming from,” says Irannejad. 
A calligraphy artist that she represents, for example, used to get by on commercial illustration alone but recently took a part-time job at Trader Joe’s, where they now hand-paint the store’s signage. It is this kind of career diversification, Irannejad says, that is becoming increasingly common. 
“Diversification has always been the case. But right now it’s not negotiable,” agrees creative coach Koh. “I call it a layered career.” She points to Pablo Delcan as a prime example of a freelancer who has made this kind of layered career a success. Delcan works across multiple forms—from stop motion and cover design to title sequences—but also teaches, publishes books, and sells physical objects in his webstore (everything from totes and baseball caps to hand-painted artworks).  
To set yourself up for freelance, says Koh, more than ever, is “marketing all day long. If you’re not findable on Google, on ChatGPT . . . it’s going to be harder to run your business.” 
Across several interviews, it became clear that well-established designers, who are known in the industry for a personal aesthetic or approach, are the least financially affected by the changes wrought by AI. They say that they’ve seen an uptick in luxury clients commissioning work, as brands seek to differentiate themselves through creative that immediately reads as human-made craft.
“Craft and visual art is almost becoming something considered premium,” says Irannejad, citing brands like Hermès and Bottega Veneta as deliberately engaging human creators for their marketing as a new way to stand apart from AI slop. “There is a luxury and a beauty in the craft . . . you know the work you’re getting is 100 percent bespoke and ownable.” 
For those unable to penetrate into this most exclusive luxury market, the path is less clear. Koh is adamant that she would not recommend designers leave employment for freelance at this moment in time without already having some form of “stable income coming in,” which can support them while they build a client network; a couple of recurring clients, for example. 
“And let’s figure out if you actually want to play this game because the game is like 30-40 percent different today than it was before,” she says.
“Everyone wants an exit strategy . . .” Koh continues. “But what nobody talks about is what I call a staying strategy, and you need a staying strategy just as much as an exit strategy.”
What is evident across the survey data and multiple interviewers is that the labor of design is increasingly fragmented in today’s creative industry. Designers are forced to sell their labor in multiple markets simply to maintain the same standard of living that they used to and the market is not compensating highly skilled creative work in the way it did even a few years ago.
All of this raises bigger questions. For many years now, the freelance creative has been not only someone who simply sells their craft, but an entrepreneur expected to market themselves and build a personal brand. Diversification and resilience are emerging as absolutely vital and central capacities for freelancers navigating the age of AI. What gets lost in the urgent need to find sources of income and to adapt are questions like: Shouldn’t clients pay more? Why are corporations cutting budgets? The burden, as always, shifts to the individual. 
It’s human connections, ultimately, that are a small silver lining in this story: Irannejad and Anderson both encourage freelancers to “band together,” to join organizations like the Freelancers Union, as Anderson has done, and to share stories, exchange information about who pays on time and who doesn’t, to swap resources. The freelancers spoken to for this story describe finding most of their steady, reliable work through their community or referrals. 
As Pickins says, “The key is to get off the internet and be with people . . . People will actually take care of each other and help one another. They’ll help strangers, they’ll help friends. They will gather in large groups, they will organize.”

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In 2018, Cari Sekendur relocated from New York City to Berlin, Germany to launch an independent web design and branding studio, Butter. Like many designers who leave salaried employment to work for themselves, Sekendur was seeking greater independence and a sense of creative freedom. An entrepreneur at heart, she wanted to wear many hats beyond graphic design—including marketing, pitching to clients, building freelance teams, and developing the systems that keep a studio ticking along.

Over the last eight years, the design industry has weathered a succession of storms, from the pandemic and political upheaval to broader industry shifts like design expertise moving in-house and the acquisition of smaller studios by larger strategy firms. But for Sekendur, it’s only been in the last year specifically—with the acceleration of generative AI—that she has noticed a fundamental shift in her daily business operations and its economics.

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