AI is a huge part of it, but with it our entire practice has changed, and our clients seem to want something different from what they thought they needed, and certainly from what they were getting for so long.

It's an "it's not you, it's us" problem which many agencies can't seem to figure out.

The way I see it, the market has changed, and a lot of agencies stayed the same for too long. Offering the same services as 20 years ago, operating under the same models.

"Retainers". "Usage rights". "Deadlines". "Process".

Who. Gives. A. Fuck.

From where I stand, and what I can see is clients aren't buying design anymore, they want their problems solved within what they think might be a design space. So they come to you—a design agency or a professional. It is up to you to decide in which dose, and whether at all traditional design should be used in your collaboration.

This is a major shift which should signal to design organizations and professionals, in terms of how they should shape and position themselves.

The perception of design and its outcomes as a craft is moving away from its visual roots, and has become a more mature, and in its core a strategic practice. However there is a disconnect between the number of people who can perform this service, and the demand for it.

Agencies as far as I know sold on strategy, reliability, etc. and made money on execution.

You get a few people who do what few people can do (the account managers, creative directors, art directors, strategists, etc.) You gatekeep them. You mistify your practice so it appears to be reserved for a certain kind of person (the "unmanageable creative"). You scale by performing—what is now perceived as —simple execution of creative direction set by the aforementioned chosen few with deep understanding of what they are doing.

This is the agency model. It's more sales and management than creative. In fact, there's very little creative in running an agency.

Now that execution has become commoditized in the sense that there are mechanisms to allow for the creative work of a single person to elevate a brand into unimaginable heights, or affect a digital product when amplified with modern technology, how do agencies continue to exist?

A lot of people will say that if that's the case, they shouldn't. After all, aren't they all simply skimming off the top of the work of the individual? Sure, some agencies are rather simple in nature and all they do is sell other people's work without adding any value.

However I believe there is still reason for the design agency to exist. There are reasons why creative people might choose to work in an agency rather than in-house, or going solo. I believe that the design agency as it is today has no reason to exist anymore. It needs to find a new seat at the table, find new ways of serving the business in which it understands its new challenges.

I've spent most of my professional career trying to prove that “agency” is not a bad word. Well, I'm back at it.

2025 marks the 18th year of Superawesome, and once again I am leading it as I started it: alone. The type of work I did at Superawesome in the recent years has kept me away from design as craft, but now that I am back in the saddle I dug deep to figure out if and how design agencies can continue to exist in an industry completely flipped upside down by an amazing new, and polarizing technology.

This post is an intro to a series in which I will try to figure out how design can evolve as a service, and how designers can embrace generative as well as other qualities of AI, instead of fearing and loathing them.

Buckle up.

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