What Happens to Older Designers?

I'm 75. You will pull the keyboard out of my cold, dead hands.

"Nobody knows you are a dog on the internet" Ditto being aged ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Most of the technologies I play with - HTML5, webGL, Three.js etc - did not exist ten years ago. So it's a level playing field.

There's more open source stuff on GitHub that needs help and mentoring than you can shake a keyboard, er, stick at.

My digital afterlife is destined to be a thought-leader for generations to come. Fingers crossed.

As I started to understand that I am a designer, I came to realize that my own life is open to being designed. Day in and day out.

It turns out that that my design of my own life is one of my better efforts. ;-)

Good designers design irrespective of age.

I mean an older designer should have a rolladex full of people who they worked below, beside, and above over the course of their career to break out when they are looking for something interesting to do.

A career is an ecosystem that grows or atrophies based on the careers that surround it. The most important connection to the rest of the ecosystem is will-they-go-out-of-their-way-to-work-with-you-again.

That's true whether a potential move is up or sideways.

Good luck.

It depends what you compare it against.

Software development changes all the time, developers constantly have to upskill. Trends drive demand and NIH runs strong in the industry. There is nothing we're doing today that couldn't be done with Java for example.

Design on the other hand is interfacing with humans. Humans are meat sacks who hardly evolve or change, in fact, you might argue, they regress. For this reason, ageing as a designer is really not as challenging as being a developer. Sure, there is the newest shiny CSS frameworks, and people abandon Photoshop for Sketch then Figma. Etc. But overall, it's extremely stable. Trends, skeuomorphism, flat, neo-flat... whatever the industry do, the adaptation isn't too bad. If anything, since we moved away from skeuomorphism, we lost a whole lot of true pixel wizards. Anyone can design flat buttons, but the stuff that interface designers were doing in the early 2000s is a lost art. But I digress, overall, humans don't change, so design is a safe industry to age in. Source: I'm both.

Many go into management, as you say. In my experience the best managers were never even remotely the best designers in terms of pure raw talent. That is sorta secondary to your question, and just kinda my own personal inject. At the same time though, I think it supports the idea that staff/principal/"Distinguished whatever" titles for design serve a use case. In fact, some BigCos have adopted that model similar to Staff Software Engineer, etc. FAANG/FAANG-adjacent types. I think Amazon, Slack, Discord have staff+ level designers. I don't know the official job requirements, but I'd assume 7-10+ years of real actual digital product design work.

I imagine we will see more of that. People like me who have been around a while or longer are getting older, and not all of us want to pivot to management. Can't even imagine doing it!

I've been in this industry for ~10 years, and am getting pretty burnt out on it. Lately though things have been better. If you stick around in the field and find an answer to this question...reach out and let me know? :) Best of luck!

>What happens to ageing / older designers? What is their path if not for an inevitable pivot to management / product management?

They are brought to the farm. The slow country life lets them recover from the burnout/stress.

In all seriousness, discrimination isn't universal. If someone doesn't hire you because of your skin colour or age, someone else will. Their loss, not your loss.

I feel everyone had an opinion on this thread, but i’d be more interested in hearing a first hand experience with being older and a designer.

They keep working till retirement, as everyone else.

Hmmm.. not quite 70 but retiring Real Soon Now. I'm allegedly a software developer but I make small (efficient) web sites as well. I spend a lot of time with side projects that are getting more complex than the day job ever was. I've survived by (a) always having a side-project on the go all the time, and (b) using own time and self-education to teach myself skills that my soon-to-be-ex-employer wouldn't pay for. Oh, and (c); self-hosting to create proofs-of-concept - great fun! 70-onwards? More of the same, and I quote.. https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24

I've worked with some designers who were coming right up on what's typically 'retirement age', who were basically still individual contributors, but just at a very high level. They bring an incredible wealth of experience – everything we think is new has probably been tried at one point before. But the best ones don't take a jaded "we tried that already" view – they're just able to riff-off the new ideas while sharing insights and learnings over an incredibly long time window.

There's being physically young, and then there's having a 'Beginner's Mind', which is something that one can have at any age – or never grasp at all.

I'm 69, about to turn 70. I'm in a senior technical consulting role which often requires me to go on the tools. I work for a big, successful software firm that can afford to pay well. Most of my peers are 20+ years younger than me and quite smart, so I have to work hard to keep up. But I manage. Next year I will quit my job and 'retire'. In fact I'll be using my financial security to start up a SaaS. business. I have a bunch of ideas I've been wanting to work on. Working keeps me focused and connected. My rule is: stay interested, stay connected.

>What happens to ageing / older designers?

They will be rounded up and killed as part of the "not economically viable" class when Dalle-10 comes out.

Unfortunately the same will happen to us when Copilot 15 hits the market.

What's old to you? What's supposed to happen to designers as they get older? I'm assuming they just keep on designing. Unless there's a fresh school of design that's explicitly created to push out older design, and carve out a niche for a younger generation. Like in programming and IT. It's just that with design, there's no assumption of a design being objectively better than another. Whereas in IT, we hear a lot about rationalizing things when in reality nobody wants to maintain daddy-o's stuff.

What “design” are you referencing?

Design is timeless artistry, web is a medium of many

They...get older? Dieter Rams and Jony Ive both designed well into...at least their 50s.

Related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372997

They get better

It probably depends on the country. It can be a problem in Europe with large public sector, and less of a problem in USA (since companies care about results).