Digital creatives it's time to move on

Art Directors, Designers and Writers who switched from agency roles as digital creatives to in-house product designers. While many are still sitting in-house teams in tech firms, like banks and insurance companies, you're most likely pretty bored and feeling pretty insecure as you hear rumours that there are going to be even more cuts. Any day now it could be you.

You should start your shift out of in-house and back to agency, or at least in service to agencies, more aligned to the digital creative work being done by marketing and brand teams, including everything from microsites and content creation to branding and digital art direction with emerging technologies.

While it was cushy in corporate, those opportunities are dying. Yes, it's great being the creative in those sterile old corporate environments where you sit in a room and iterate the same old features to death. It was what everyone did and served as a great transition five to ten years ago, but that easy path is over.

It's not too soon either, because most of you have forgotten how to create. You've become process and data driven, instead of being free to explore new territories. The hope of doing meaningful work is being replaced by repetitive tasks, working within the same constraints to refine a feature that will eventually die a slow death, if it sees any further improvement at all, while corporates quietly move away from design thinking in favour of vibe coding.

Everyone's a designer now. With a short prompt, anyone can generate work that looks like it was done by the best in the industry. So what is there left to do. Unless you're in a strong position to continue pursuing design, maybe you've got a foot in a startup that's actually building AI products, you're at risk of becoming as outdated as the corporate furniture around you.

Instead, dust yourself off. Go find that one coloured sweater and replace your black t-shirt for a while. It's time to start vibing with AI. Explore new platforms where you can articulate what you want instead of pushing pixels. And if you're still passionate about shaping visuals, shift your energy toward animation, 3D, or more augmented forms of content. These are exciting new fields that are less saturated and offer more potential. It will take time to get up to speed, but it's a move worth making.

If you're more of an art director than a hands-on pixel pusher, now is the time to learn how to work through voice or text prompts, leveraging tools that can produce content and branding assets that used to require the largest budgets. You might have to take a drop in salary, but it's a small step back that puts you in a market that's not nearly as flooded and genuinely in need of digital creative talent like yours.

So what now.

Start learning and making again. Reconnect with the parts of your creativity that got buried under product strategy decks and Jira tickets. Build a portfolio that shows you can create content, not just refine flows. Test new tools. Work faster. Focus your energy on the kind of work that still requires creative thinking and clear direction.

If you're serious about staying relevant, this is the moment to act.