I’m making a big batch strawberry shrub (berries, fruit, cider vinegar concoction for cocktails or seltzer) this weekend to share with friends, thought that a label might be fun, and within three minutes had designed and ordered 10 of these as stickers as well as the bottle to use for the shrub.

In the past, I would not have hired a graphic designer to make a label or even have fired up Illustrator to attempt something much lamer that what ChatGPT came up with (exactly what I intended in one shot). In the past I would have pulled out my sharpie and scrawled something as unappealing looking as Trump’s signature.

So instead of sharpie I get some custom graphic design, which does not displace any really existing graphic designer. It’s wholly new production.

What does more graphic design in the world say about our future need for graphic designers? Perhaps having more we will come to demand better of the designs we don’t produce ourselves, and there will be more graphic designers in the future rather than less. In that case graphic design would parallel the example of bank tellers and the ATM during the 1980s.